The Promise of Precision Medicine: Searching for the Correct Needle among Many Haystacks

As a disease, cancer lends itself particularly well to precision medicine. ... Read More

The 5 Percent: Can we change the health trajectory of rising-risk patients?

According to the noble mission statements of academic medical centers, we are committed to “healing humankind,” “advancing human health,” “alleviating suffering,” and “improving the quality of life” of the community, the country and the world. ... Read More

'It Was the Best of Times …It Was the Worst of Times in Health Care' Louise Aronson Challenges Doctors to A Revolution

On a rainy Seattle afternoon, Louise Aronson, M.D., MFA, proposed unleashing a revolution. She spoke to a conference room filled with hundreds of doctors at the 2016 Association for American Medical Colleges Conference.... Read More

Breaking the cycle: Academic medical centers need to build cultures that stop sexual harassment

The list of documented sexual harassment cases in research settings keeps growing:... Read More

In a fractured country, academic medical centers are doing ‘social repair’

The past decade has been rough on academic medicine.... Read More

Looking for leaders after leadership went missing

History holds a lesson for Americans still reeling from the 2016 election. The characteristics of true leadership—hard work, resilience and virtue among them—seemed to disappear over the past year... Read More

The XX Factor

We've still got a long way to go in supporting women in science and medicine. Nationwide, only 20 percent of assistant professors in STEM and medical colleges are women. And pay inequity is alive and well; A recent study of New England researchers found that male scientists received more than 2.5 times the startup funding than their female counterparts did.... Read More

Fueling the Fire: Fostering Women in Science

Scanning this glossy photo, it doesn’t look like we have a gender problem: A dozen young female scientists are striving and thriving, tackling medical problems from how burns transform fat to the relationship between the microbiota and immunity. ... Read More

Is the cost of health care a barrier between providers and their patients?

Under University of Utah Health Care’s Value-Driven Outcomes initiative, more than 6,000 staff and faculty have logged on or signed up for face-to-face training seminars. Collectively they’ve developed more than 750 value projects, 180 measures of quality, more than 100 tests of service and 109 cost benchmarks. ... Read More

How can we help patients have a good death?

When Joan Sheetz, M.D., and Anna C. Beck, M.D., met during their work at Salt Lake City’s Fourth Street Clinic for the homeless, they were able to recognize a shared interest in the humanistic side of medicine—the ability to look beyond the illness or injury to the person behind the problem. ... Read More

Should medical board exams be open book?

"The problem with medical school is the Krebs Cycle." This is a common refrain from physicians. More precisely, the problem is rote memorization of the Krebs cycle, other metabolic pathways and seemingly useless facts. ... Read More

Are we destined to live in a world of “previvors” and “post-humans”?

Hollywood has already imagined it: Gattaca, an apocalyptic world driven by genetic engineering, where only embryos with the best of their parents’ characteristics ("valids") become children. ... Read More

The Doctor will Skype with you Now

Telemedicine can improve access to care and lower costs, but how do we make sure it’s safe and of value to the patient and not just health systems figuring out how to do things more cheaply?... Read More

Were the Economists Wrong About Health Care?

Empowering consumers to shop based on price and quality was supposed to force health organizations to compete on those terms—making health care better and more affordable. Yet, health spending continues to rise in the U.S. Despite a groundswell of pricing and quality data being unleashed, consumers still aren’t shopping for health care like they do other goods and services. Meanwhile, proponents of consumerism have begun to publicly question its limits—and the dangers of ignoring those limits.... Read More

Innovation: Giving Patients 'What they Love Before they Know they Want it'

It's a pervasive dilemma in health care. Though the industry is in flux, and we know "business-as-usual" can't last, there’s no real urgency to change because the old way of doing things is still lucrative.... Read More

Doctor or Patient? Who Owns Medical Records?

Rachel (not her real name) has been a patient of mine for more than three years. She has a borderline personality disorder that makes it extremely difficult for her to create and sustain relationships and causes significant fluctuations in mood. ... Read More

Physician burnout on the rise

Constrained funding, constantly being asked to do more with less, increased scrutiny and an unclear roadmap for the future—health care’s constant flux is making medicine harder than it should be. And health care workers are feeling the grind. More than half of physicians report feeling exhausted and ineffective, according to a recent Mayo Clinic and American Medical Association study. And it’s even worse for trainees, according to a JAMA study that found doctors in training are more susceptible to depression than the general population.... Read More

Hospitals Feeling the Pinch of High Drug Prices

Patients aren’t alone in their angst over soaring drug costs. Hospitals, too, are struggling to keep up with price hikes on older, off-patent drugs—and some are having to make tough decisions about how much of these medicines to keep in stock. ... Read More

Guess Who’s Hopeful About Health Care?

Think academic medicine is stodgy, hidebound or slow to innovate? Think again. Faculty, scientists and administrators of the nation’s teaching hospitals are actually quite progressive and optimistic about the future of medicine.... Read More

Making Sure Informed Consent is Truly Informed: Research in the Digital Age

Guinea pigs no more. The power dynamic is shifting between clinical-research participants and investigators. ... Read More