Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) remain scary territory in healthcare reform. Healthcare providers are still trying to figure them out. Generically defined, they are a unified group of care providers responsible for providing a total treatment package to a patient in exchange for a single payment of fee; it is a “payment for quality” not a… [Read more…]
October 26, 2011
At the AHCA / FHEA Conference in Orlando a few weeks ago, I shared lunch with a gentleman whose business is after-market service on hospital beds, which wins the prize for the most mundane healthcare business in my book. I asked him how he did what he did, and he described his small company almost… [Read more…]
October 24, 2011
Thus far, healthcare has been…immune to some of the logistics developments over the past decade or so that have revolutionized delivery of products and services. The most obvious one that comes to mind is Walmart’s supply chain savvy, which is used primarily on the back end by the companies that supply the Walmarts and grocery… [Read more…]
October 21, 2011
Plants improve air quality—maybe not a newsflash to most of you. Yet as a follow-up to my recent pieces on design and indoor air quality, I have a short piece worth pointing out from the November issue of Reader’s Digest (I read most everything I can get my hands on). RD cites a Wall Street Journal article… [Read more…]
October 20, 2011
A couple years ago I tuned into an AIA webinar that described ways architects could avoid legal issues on projects. Some of the points I picked up have sufaced from time-to-time, luckily on projects I have not worked on. It seems relevant to relate a few of the more useful, universal ideas, which are particularly applicable to healthcare… [Read more…]
October 17, 2011
While traveling in the Atlanta airport last week, something strange happened: I walked into a restaurant serving breakfast that allowed smoking. I had just landed in the D concourse after the early flight from Jacksonville, about 7:40am. I had already been up for several hours, and with a decent layover, I thought I would grab… [Read more…]
October 10, 2011
Fast Company had an article recently that touched on a well-recognized, yet simple and powerful entrepreneurial formula: take an expensive product available to the few, and make it simple and affordable to many, and you have a winner. A somewhat public display of this strategy was Nicolas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child mission initiated several… [Read more…]
October 7, 2011
Sometime in the 1980s “alternative rock” came to prominence as a fresh, different yet appealing sound from traditional pop music that had dominated radio play. Alt-rock bands produced music that catered to distinct subgroups of fans, some of which enjoyed their music with more folk, goth, poetics, anger, or more electric guitar—there was a very… [Read more…]
October 5, 2011
Some hospitals and systems utilize a formal selection process to determine which architect and contractor teams they would like to work with. Such a system, though defensible to Boards and CEOs, is fraught with unseen limitations and waste. I support a more efficient way: choose someone the administration trusts and negotiate an agreement. I call this the Trust Your Gut… [Read more…]
October 3, 2011
On Saturday, Jonah Lehrer penned a piece in the Wall Street Journal about decision making in the modern marketplace. His thesis is that humans believe we can make the best decision to select a product for purchase via reason, but that our brains are severely limited in dealing with facts, which frustrates this approach. The crux of… [Read more…]
October 30, 2011
0