health department

A tale from the trenches. In recent years, as a result of the 2010 IT-related injury and 2011 death of my mother, I have engaged myself as an independent EHR forensic expert regarding evidentiary and patient harm issues in medical malpractice litigation.  Interestingly and disappointingly, I still often find that hospital attitudes towards health IT safety and information transparency have

There seems to be another fox ready to guard the already flustered educational, including medical educational hen house. Dr Julian Schmoke to Lead Student Aid Enforcement Unit According to Politico on August 30, 2017, the new head of enforcement for the Department of Education will be one Dr Julian Schmoke Jr, The Trump administration has tapped a former for-profit college official to lead

Stealthy, deceptive systematic marketing, lobbying, and policy advocacy campaigns on behalf of big health care organizations, often pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device companies, have long been a subject of Health Care Renewal.  A relatively recently revealed example was the stealth marketing campaign used by GlaxoSmithKline to sell its antidepressant Paxil.  This campaign included

Leaders of big health care organizations have long made excuses for rampant conflicts of interest in health care.  Usually, their rationales included something about the need to collaborate with industry to spark innovation.  However, some leaders may have been directly benefiting from such conflicts (e.g., academic leaders on the payrolls of drug, device and biotechnology firms, even on the

Introduction: Health Care Corruption An important theme of Health Care Renewal has been health care corruption as a cause of health care dysfunction. Transparency International (TI) defines corruption as Abuse of entrusted power for private gain In 2006, TI published a report on health care corruption, which asserted that corruption is widespread throughout the world, serious, and causes

It looks like the bizarre process in the US Senate ostensibly to "repeal and replace Obamacare" (aka the Affordable Care Act, or ACA) may be ending, at least for now.  I can only hope that further discussion of health care reform will let sanity prevail, and start to address the major issues that have led to the massive dysfunction of US health care, but were not discussed during the latest

A common justification for a market fundamentalist approach to health care is the promise of innovation.  Providing market-based incentives will inspire generations of entrepreneurs who will bring out new and wondrous health care products and services, or so the story goes.  So we are now daily bombarded with media coverage of the latest innovations by such entrepreneurs.  But after the initial