RWL Newsletter #31
Greetings from the snowed-in University of New Hampshire!
Woo! We got about 18 inches of accumulation this week, 12 of it yesterday. I feel bad for my colleagues who teach on Tuesdays and Thursdays - they have lost three of the six classes that were supposed to have met so far this semester.
I'm going for inspirational this week. With all this cold and snow, I felt like I needed to get fired up. So hopefully I've chosen some personal stories that will get you fired up about healthcare!
Read
What: from the NYT, His Doctors Were Stumped. Then He Took Over. by Katie Thomas
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/business/his-doctors-were-stumped-then-he-took-over.html
Why: This is a remarkable story of rare disease. David Fajgenbaum was struck by Castleman's disease while in medical school. Castleman's disease is a rare condition, and like rare conditions it is often missed or mis-diagnosed. This story stood out to me because of some previous research I did on health communication and the use of social media by people with rare diseases to support each other and share knowledge. This article doesn't go into that aspect of having a rare disease, but it does do a nice job of capturing the difficulty of medical research, especially when the condition is rare. It's worth thinking about when we think about policy incentives in our health system.
Watch
What:TEDxFargo, The New “Disrupters” in Healthcare – Patients and Pharmacists, Rajiv Shah
https://youtu.be/ajmT93H2RpA
Why: He gets at an important idea - that we need to take full advantage of all of the skilled care givers working in our system, and allow them to work up to their full capability. In particular he focuses on pharmacists, but I think that is really just one example of where we have people with extensive training who are not participating fully on the care team.
Listen
What: Global Dispatches interview with Dr. Larry Brilliant
http://www.globaldispatchespodcast.com/episode-138-dr-larry-brilliant/
Why: Dr. Brilliant helped eradicate small pox. That should be enough to justify listening to this biographical interview. But it's a really interesting story that characterized a generation of public health leaders. Since I teach in an undergraduate program that offers public health education to young folks, it's good for me, as more of a direct care system guy, to remember what the spirit of the field is. Brilliant's career is inspiring.
That's it for this week!
If you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://tinyletter.com/markbonica
I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line by e-mail, or you can tweet to me at @bonicatalent .
Thanks for reading and see you next week!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Assistant Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast: http://healthleaderforge.org
Twitter: @bonicatalent
"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor." - Henry David Thoreau