Today's topics: VA health care politics; a clear-eyed and sane report from a bastion of managerialism, with related observations on inno...
Dander Up, Down, and All Around
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The Demise of the Trump Foundation, an Extreme Example of Elite "Do-Gooding" to Prop Up the "Broken System" that Benefits Them
Big foundations often claim that they are out to improve society. For example, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation claims to be the nation’s...
Johnson and Johnson's Latest Ethical Misadventures: Settled Kickback Allegations, Reportedly Concealed Knowledge of Adverse Effects of a "Sacred Cow" Product
Giant pharmaceutical/ biotechnology/ device company Johnson & Johnson has its famous "credo" which starts with We believe our ...
Mission-Hostile Hospital Management: Quieter, but Still Pernicious After All These Years
Hospitals exist to take care of sick people, with the goal of making them better. Hospitals employ and work with health care professionals,...
The Perils of CEO Worship - What Happens When the Leader Becomes Demented?
Introduction: the Cult of the CEO Although the US and most developed countries are nominally democratic, many of us seem to be again yearnin...
From Russia with Money - Harvard Medical School Accepts $200 Million from Russian Emigre with Ties to Russian Oligarchs and Putin, and Who Is Under Investigation for US Election Meddling
On Health Care Renewal we have frequently written about individual and institutional conflicts of interest. The landmark but often ignored ...
Pharmaceutical and Other Health Care Corporations Funnel Dark Money to Republicans to Defeat "Leftward" Democratic Candidates - Partisanship Trumps Social Responsibility
Introduction - Health Care Corporations Profess Social Responsibility As we noted recently, large health corporations, which must deal with ...
Nonsense-Based Health Care - in the Service of Political Ideology and Sectarian Beliefs
As an advocate for evidence-based medicine, I am used to disagreeing with officials at US government health agencies on the finer points of ...
Issues at the 18th International Anti-Corruption Conference
Many issues brought up at the 18th International Anti-Corruption Conference (IACC) in Copenhagen, Denmark, were relevant to the problems of ...
Update: How to Challenge Health Care Corruption Under a Corrupt Regime
Summary: the Corruption of Health Care Leadership as a Major Cause of Health Care Dysfunction As we wrote in August, 2017, Transparency Inte...
The Politicization of Pharma, and Other Health Care Corporations - Walk on the Dark (Money) Side
Introduction - Health Care Corporations Profess Social Responsibility As we noted recently, large health corporations, which deal with patie...
New York Times Remembers Dr Bernard Carroll, the "Conscience of Psychiatry"
We at Health Care Renewal miss Dr Bernard Carroll, who we were proud to count among our bloggers. The New York Times just published a kind o...
Pharma's Dark Money: Touting Corporate Responsibility and Non-Partisanship, But Using Dark Money to Promote Self-Serving Policies and Partisan Causes
Health Care Corporations Promote Their Social Responsibility The US health care system's extreme dsyfnctionality is now a cliche. So it...
The Mystery of the Ownership of the Trinity School of Medicine
Trinity School of Medicine Vice President Boasts that It Is "Not the Same" As Most Offshore Medical Schools A post promoting the T...
Remembering Dr Bernard Carroll
Dr Bernard Carroll passed away on September 10, 2018. Dr Carroll had a distinguished career, so it was a surprise and delight that he also ...
Fake Reform Foisted on Us by Those who Benefit Most from the Current Dysfunction
Introduction - No Funding for You To better understand health care dysfunction, I interviewed doctors and health professionals, and publishe...
Michael Fine's Health Care Revolt
Michael Fine, M.D., HealthCare Revolt: How to Organize, Build a Health Care System, and Resuscitate Democracy – All at the Same Time (Oaklan...
Apologizing for Problems with Commenting
My apologies! I discovered a few days ago that our Google overlords had stopped notifying me about pending comments some months ago. No ind...
EHR evidentiary mayhem
A short post. I am encountering, in my legal work, electronic medical records systems that either allow ex post facto note alterations by cl...
Dander Still Up, And Also Down, All Over the Place. What Gives?
A. The Present Moment. I've started this piece a whole bunch of times. So in fairness to you, reader, you have a few paths through it. I...
Making Abusive Contracts Great Again - Non-Disclosure Agreements, Which Have Bedeviled Employed Physicians, Go From Anechoic to Viral Courtesy Omarosa
Introduction: Confidentiality Clauses, Non-Disclosure Agreements, Non-Disparagement Clauses In 2016, Dr Wally Smith and I published an artic...
#WHISTLEBLOWER tonight on CBS at 9 pm: Brendan Delaney and Electronic Medical Records
I received this today. I have been writing on healthcare information technology problems for 20 years, on this site since 2004 and others s...
Make Asbestos Great Again? - Trump Once Claimed "Movement Against by Asbestos was Led by the Mob," Now EPA Wants to Relax Asbestos Regulation
Introduction: An Old Public Health Menace This is somewhat personal. In the early 1980s, as a general internal medicine fellow, I gave a s...
Ill-informed, Mission-Hostile Health Care Leadership... in the White House and the US Department of Health and Human Services
Introduction - What Has Gone Wrong with the Leadership of Health Care Organizations A major focus of Health Care Renewal has been problems i...
Spin it Again - Four More Go Through the Revolving Door From the World of Corporate Health Care to Top US Government Leadership Positions
While we were distracted by the daily onslaught of news, it appears that the revolving door continues to spin. This month there has been a f...
Chipping Away at the Anechoic Effect: Now the New York Times Protests the Demise of the AHRQ National Guidelines Clearinghouse
Background: the Quiet Announcement of the Death of the Clearinghouse On June 1, 2018, we wrote: Apparently as of late April, a terse announc...
A Physician Who Had Run Clinics Which Proselytized Patients is Now a Government Health Care Leader Positioned to Enforce Her Religious Beliefs on Patients and Citizens Who Do Not Hold Such Beliefs
Introduction: Physicians' Values and Organizational Missions Physicians professional values require them to put the interests of their i...
"Hope in a Bottle" - Components of Purdue Pharma Stealth Marketing Campaign for Oxycontin Revealed by Legal Documents from Tennessee
Introduction: Disinformation and Stealth Marketing Campaigns Back in the distant past the US government made some attempt to hold big health...
Growing Health Care and Grand Governmental Corruption - But Still Anechoic After All These Years
Here we go again. We have long been concerned about health care corruption as a major cause of health care dysfunction. Our last post on th...
Have They Finally Got to You? - the Firing of Dr Gu
Introduction - Dr Gu's History of Activism Made Him Unpopular at Vanderbilt We first wrote in February, 2018, about the plight of Dr Eug...
Dander Still Up. Drowning in Great Dismal Swamp. Film at Eleven.
Maybe this is the last in my series of dander-raising essays, as recent national and world events have most definitely left so many of us wi...
Why Did CVS Health Betray its Charitable Giving Policy and Social Responsibility Agenda to Donate to a Sketchy Non-Profit Devoted to Trump's Agenda?
Many big health care organizations, including for-profit corporations, have high-minded mission statements, and proclaim their social respon...
The Stealth Shutdown of the US Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research (AHRQ) National Guideline Clearinghouse
The Quiet Announcement of the Shut Down Apparently as of late April, a terse announcement appeared on the website of the US AHRQ National Gu...
The March of Legal Settlements Made by Pharmaceutical Companies is Diminishing - Presaging Even Less Accountablity for Top Health Care Organizational Leaders?
Introduction We have long been discussing the legal settlements made by health care organizations of alllegations like fraud, bribery, and ...
A Higher Impunity - How Can we Reduce Health Care Leadership's Impunity When the President Claims His Own Impunity?
Impunity: an Introduction We believe that unaccountable leadership is a major cause of health care dysfunction. Impunity is an extreme form...
Novartis' Latest Ethical Misadventure: Did it Pay to Play ... with the US President?
Amidst the news deluge, a story that stood out in the last few days was that of the strange relationships between a consulting firm set up b...
More Dander Rising: Ditto to Dr. Poses
Let me second the emotion now recently and repeatedly voiced by Dr. Poses in these pages. It's getting real hard to separate the health ...
The Two-Fold Intimidation of Dr Bornstein, as Orchestrated by Donald Trump, Apparently to Conceal Something About Trump's Medical History
Introduction: Pressures on Health Care Professionals to Violate Core Values and Ethical Standards Our first discussions with health professi...
Don't Know Much About Health Care and Public Health, and Don't Care Much About Their Missions - but in Leadership Positions in US Government Health Agencies
Here we go again. As we We have frequently discussed how health care leadership is often ill-informed ( look here). More and more peopl...
Through the Revolving Door, with a Few Stumbles - Health Care Corporate Executives and Consultants Continue to Become Leaders of Trump's Department of Health and Human Services
We continue to see a remarkable stream of people transiting the revolving door from high-level positions in health care corporations to hig...
Don't Know Much About Health Care and Public Health... but Appointed to Leadership Positions in US Government Health Care Agencies
We have often cited bad leadership and governance of health care organizations as a major causes of health care dysfunction. In particular,...
The Dander Riseth Ever Higher: Shulkin Case Emblematic of Dysfunction
What follows is numero sesto if memory serves in a series of what gets one's dander up in this era of dysfunctional health care. Of cour...
How Do We Counter Health Care Disinformation Under a Disinformer-in-Chief?
"Don't worry, things could be worse. And sure enough, things got worse." Disinformation in Medicine and Health Care Stealthy,...
And the Dander Keeps On Rising
This is número cinco in our series of attempts to shed some of this dander. But it keeps on rising. Here are two recent reports both relatin...
In "Trump Town," the Revolving Door Runneth Over: Yet More Ex-Lobbyists as Political Appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services
We have accumulated a remarkable number of stories of people transiting the revolving door from high-level positions in health care corpora...
Quattro! More from the DOG Patch.
Some more offerings in our fourth effort in these pages to get rid of this damned dander. It's still up! Here in the DOG Patch, D is for...
How Corporate Health Care Leaders Maintain Their Impunity: The Case of Purdue Pharma's Funding of the Washington Legal Foundation to Attempt to Weaken the Responsible Corporate Officer Doctrine
The ongoing epidemic of narcotic (opioid) abuse, and the resulting rise in the deaths due to overdoses, has focused attention on pharmaceuti...
Dander Gathering Again: Terzo
It's hard these days to rid oneself of the rising dander. Dander Omnium Gatherum Patch Numero Terzo. To put it more simply, here are mor...
Tales from the DOG Patch: Numero Deux
A tip of the hat to Dr. Roy Poses, who did a nice job summarizing the first blast from the DOG Patch. (For those who missed it, it's a d...
The Case of the Brew Master's Plot - Was the Veterans Affairs Secretary's Travel Spending Scandalous, or Was He Framed in a Plot to Oust a Political Moderate?
"Come, Watson, come! The brew is afoot." The Veterans Affairs Secretary's Apparently Scandalous Travel On February 14, 2018, t...
Welcome to the DOG Patch: first in a series?
Lately my dander is up so often and so copiously, over what's happening in health care and the world at large, I'm exhausted. Covere...
Labels:
Aetna,
DHHS,
Eli Lilly,
health care prices,
narcotics,
postmodernism,
ppaca,
Purdue Pharma,
vaccines
New article in J. of General Internal Medicine calls for simplifying EHRs
At my January 31, 2018 Healthcare Renewal blog post "The inevitable downgrading of burdensome, destructive EHRs back to paper & doc...
Are You With Us, Dr Gu? - Vanderbilt Suspended Surgical Resident Allegedly Due to Patient's Mother's Compaints About His "Taking a Knee" on Social Media
In the US, our political situation seems to be leading to new threats to free speech in academic medicine. Background: Dr Gu's Activism...
Free Press? Don't Need No Stinkin' Free Press - Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Tries to Intimidate Modern Healthcare Journalist
Remember the good ol' days, when most US challenges to free speech or the free press in health care came from aggrieved corporate or aca...
Fish gotta fly, birds gotta swim: more on the opiate crisis
At so many levels, the current opiate crisis, and the way in which various actors are seeking to cope with it, proves rich in intriguing det...
Disastrously conceived, managed, and implemented U.S. Coast Guard EHR leaves our Coast Guard heroes safer ... after reversion to paper records
Sometimes, the typical EHR mismanagement debacles that I have been writing about since at least 1999 leave patients safer. This is one such...
The inevitable downgrading of burdensome, destructive EHRs back to paper & document imaging
In recent days, I've posted about current articles on the destructive nature of today's vastly over-complex, burdensome EHR technolo...
Burnout Returns to Center Stage
A recent Mayo Clinic Proceedings guest editorial, by Yale University physician Kristine Olson, asks the question--to some of us it's far...
Physicians Harassed by Overwhelming Levels of Messaging From Electronic Medical Records
In yet another example of the clerical overload caused by bad health IT, physicians find themselves drinking from a fire hose through cybern...
Medical Economics: Highly experienced physicians lost to medicine over bad health IT
The title of the article is actually "Physicians leaving profession over EHRs", but that title omits the real impact of the phenom...
More on the Opiate Abuse Epidemic: Where Again Does the Finger Point?
In a recent blog post we pointed to conservatives' efforts to implicate Medicaid funding as somehow causative of, or at least promoting,...
Not just bad health IT, but SPECTACULARLY bad health IT
I define bad healthcare IT as: ... IT that is ill-suited to purpose, hard to use, unreliable, loses data or provides incorrect data, is diff...
Will the New Conscience and Religious Freedom Division of the US Department of Health and Human Services Help Health Care Professionals Challenge Morally Objectionable Acts - Like Bribery, Fraud and Other Criminal or Corrupt Practices?
For a long time we have argued that health care corruption is a major cause of health care dysfunction. We have documented numerous cases i...
Big Bang Theory of Health Care: Ever Since 1967
Hold on to your hat: it all comes together now. Looking at events in our nation's capital, in a strange fever dream, The Big Bang Theory...
"Hot Spot For User Entry Error": Hawaii missile alert: How one employee ‘pushed the wrong button’ and caused a wave of panic
A short post. I believe this WaPo story vividly demonstrates issues I've seen in what Australian colleague Dr. Jon Patrick & I call ...
How To Challenge Health Care Corruption Under a Corrupt Regime?
Introduction: the Corruption of Health Care Leadership as a Major Cause of Health Care Dysfunction For a long time we have argued that healt...
Ill-Informed, Incompetent* Health Care Leadership: the Case of President Trump's Interview in the New York Times
[* - see discussion of definitions below] On December 28, 2017, the New York Times published an impromptu interview by reporter Michael S Sc...
A Remedy for Corruption
Do I really have a remedy for corruption? I wish I did. But, I have lately found an effective balm for the sickening discouragement that it ...
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