Standing at the western end of the United States/Mexico border fence is like being plopped into the middle of an awkward conversation between Frida Kahlo and Dick Cheney. Nowhere are the differences between the two cultures more apparent.”
Read how one Korean-American artist from San Diego, Youn Woo Chaa, is helping to bridge the cultural, political and structural gap with a giant hand sculpture, read “One giant gesture” by Kinsee Morlan in this week’s San Diego CityBeat.
If you’d rather not lend credence and support to those who help “find buyers for enslaved young girls,” read what Nicholas Kristof has to say about Backpage.com in his March 17, 2012, column in The NY Times. Entitled Where pimps peddle their goods, it will make you think twice before you post an ad on Backpage.com.
San Diego Entrepreneurs Exchange Sponsors Free Forum featuring Joe Smith (WWHI), Jack Young (Qualcomm), Rob McCray (WLSA) and Other Experts Discussing ‘What Makes San Diego a Mecca for Wireless Health?‘
If you’ve been following the current healthcare debate, you know the U.S. outspends other countries by far, yet still ranks, as Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance CEO Rob McCray and others have repeatedly pointed out, “at or near the bottom of industrialized nations’ health outcomes.” And studies show higher spending doesn’t always correlate with better outcomes.
“The solution to these problems,” says McCray, “lies not in continuing to deploy the current anti-competitive, labor-intensive, inconvenient, obscenely expensive and nontransparent model for healthcare services and delivery. For the benefit of rich and poor countries alike, we must migrate to a connected, affordable, personalized and accountable 21st century model of healthcare.”
For McCray—and the five expert panelists joining him Mar. 21 to answer the question, “What Makes San Diego a Mecca for Wireless Health“—”that new model is wirelessly enabled health. “The event is sponsored by the San Diego Entrepreneurs Exchange, which holds a quarterly series of events to foster the success of local entrepreneurs. The Mar. 21 forum is our first to explore the world of wireless health technology, notes SDEE President Scott Thacher, Ph.D., an entrepreneur who founded Orphagen Pharmaceuticals.
Just as San Jose became synonymous with silicon chip advances, San Diego is fast becoming “the global center for healthcare innovation,” says Joe Smith, MD, of the West Wireless Health Institute—and the epicenter of the seismic event that wireless healthcare technology represents, according to Malcolm Bohm, who will moderate the forum.
In addition to McCray and Smith, panelists include local entrepreneurs Joe Condurso of PatientSafe and Kian Saneii of Independa. The panel also includes two fund managers who specialize in this field, one of whom, Jack Young of Qualcomm Ventures, Qualcomm Incorporated’s venture investment group, notes that “the increasing proliferation of wireless technology in healthcare product designs and services is improving care outcomes while enhancing quality of life.”
Dirk Lammerts, MD, of Burrill in San Francisco, a second panelist who invests in wireless health technology, agrees: “Digital and mobile applications, wireless biosensors, and social media integration are providing a platform to fundamentally improve healthcare access and quality worldwide. Redesigning healthcare around people and establishing large networks of engaged patients and consumers will not only improve quality and cost of care, and integrate healthcare more closely with prevention and wellness, but also offer great prospects for building successful businesses.”
“As with all our events, we expect discussion to be spirited,” says Thacher. “Special thanks go to venue sponsor AMN Healthcare.”
Register for the Wireless Health Forum.
Access the PRN Wireless Health Forum release.
“America spends far more than other countries, and doesn’t see better results,” says Oncologist Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, in an opinion piece in Sunday’s New York Times.
His conclusion? “The $2.6 trillion the US is spending on health care is too much, and we can reduce it without rationing or sacrificing quality.”
Emanuel is a professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
Click on “How much does health cost?” for the full article.
In an article in last Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, Dartmouth Professor H. Gilbert Welch, MD, makes a strong case for how best to reform Medicare. Welch, who co-authored “Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health,” makes three important points:
According to Welch, “We doctors joke that the well person is the one we have not examined thoroughly enough. (The last Medicare skin exam that failed to identify something that might lead to skin cancer occurred in 1970.) But it’s not funny anymore. Because once you are labeled at-risk, something must be done. My Medicare would recognize the problems with this approach. Because almost everyone is transformed into a patient needing intervention, it’s an approach that costs a huge amount of money. And no matter what we doctors do, we can’t take you to zero risk. But we can cause harm. Our medications have side effects; our surgeries and procedures have complications. And occasionally our interventions cause death.”
Click on “What the Doctor Ordered” to read more.
San Francisco Bay Area physician Rahul Parikh Parikh, MD, writes about how the lack of a consistent handoff process in medicine affects care quality and safety. One of his colleagues, Doug Bonacum, a nuclear engineer, is using lessons learned as a Navy submariner in terms of orders hand-off protocols to help clinicians avoid mistakes as Kaiser’s vice president of safety management.
“He’s not a doctor himself … (he’s) trying to show that the techniques he learned in the military to communicate are the exact same ones doctors need to use during handoffs.”
He goes on to quote Bonacum: “When I set foot on a nuclear submarine fresh out of the Naval Academy, the very first thing I had to prove was that I could use the phone. That really surprised me, given that we had nuclear generators and weapons on this ship. But I wasn’t allowed to do anything more until I had shown that I could receive, and read back, an order. If I couldn’t, the officer on the line would say ‘Wrong’ and ‘Repeat again’ until I got it right.
“I would sign out the issues and events that happened on my watch the same way each day. Anybody who assumed my post would do it the exact same way to their relief as well. In medicine, if I follow three different doctors around on three different days, I’ll see three different ways of signing out patients.”
Click on “Doctors could learn something about medical handoffs from the Navy” to read more.
