Health Science

The academic health IT community has spent the past decade (at least) burying their collective ostrich heads in the sand about the crappy software that is called health IT.A few, though, have taken on the health IT industry at the heart of bad health IT design (including yours truly, which sadly was not enough to save my own mother from health IT design...

A Huge, but Sketchy Merger The announced merger and "tax inversion" of Pfizer and Allergan would be one of the largest corporate marriages in US history.  It has drawn more than its share of criticism.  For example, per the Los Angeles Times, former US Senator and Secretary of State, and current presidential candidate Hilary Clinton said...

In the last post, we saw that carbohydrate and particularly sugar intake have been declining in the US since 1999, even as our obesity rate has continued to climb. In this post, let's look at another putative driver of obesity: our fat intake, and especially our intake of added fats like seed oils, butter, and olive oil.  Like the graphs in the...

An Unprecedented Endorsement  It's deja vu all over again.  In the spring of 2015, the New England Journal, the most prestigious US medical journal, published a remarkable series of opinion pieces extrolling physician-industry collaborations, and minimizing the significance of resulting conflicts of interest.  More remarkable was the...

Not to toot our own horn too loudly, but in the last week, Health Care Renewal bloggers have appeared in print three times.Prevalence of Board Level Conflicts of InterestWe recently posted on a British Medical Journal article on the prevalence of what we originally termed "a new species of conflicts of interest," that is, conflicts of interest involving...

We like explanations that are simple, easy to understand, and explain everything.  One example of this is the idea that eating carbohydrate, or sugar, is the primary cause of obesity.  This lets us point our finger at something concrete and change our behavior accordingly.  And it's true enough that it has practical value.  But...

On Health Care Renewal, we have posted story after story about amazingly well paid leaders of big organizations presiding over amazingly bad organizational behavior (including subversion of mission, conflicts of interest, deception, fraud, kickbacks, various other crimes and outright corruption).  Yet the leaders often seem curiously disconnected...

The huge corporations which now dominate global health care are creating amazing records of repeated ethical misadventures.  We last discussed multinational Swiss based pharmaceutical manufacturer Novartis' escapades in early 2014.   Since then, the legal settlements and other legal findings just keep on coming, capped with a big one...

This week's lucky "winner"... the Reese's PBC Burger!!Image credit: The WorksRead more...

Physicians are sworn to provide the best possible care to each individual patient.  Yet in the US, physicians increasingly practice as employees of large organizations, sometime for-profit corporations.  Physicians may be in a bind when their bosses pressure them to make patient level decisions so as to increase revenue, regardless of their...