Biomedical subjects
D O Weber
Publications and source records attributed to D O Weber.
Complementary and alternative medicine. Considering the alternatives.
Therapies variously described as alternative, complementary, or unconventional because they lie outside the realm of scientific medicine practiced by graduates of orthodox U.S. medical schools are gaining mainstream respectability despite many questions about their efficacy and safety. Depending on definitions, surveys indicate that fewer than 10 percent to nearly 40 percent of Americans supplement or substitute for conventional health care with alternative systems of medical practice. Spending for complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) nationwide has been estimated at up to $14 billion a year. Establishment of an Office of Alternative Medicine in the National Institutes of Health in 1992 has heartened advocates of CAM, increased interest and government funding for research into unorthodox therapies, and lent credibility to CAM modalities. Embracing marginal therapies may represent an opportunity for physicians and health systems to reduce inappropriate consumption, offer a wider range of choices to patients, and profit from a lucrative market.
Web sites of tomorrow: how the Internet will transform healthcare.
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Age cannot wither: the golden age of the golden years.
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Paying for the biomedical future.
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Cooling it gets hot.
Conflict is an inevitable part of work and relationships. How it is handled determines what can and cannot be accomplished personally, professionally, and organizationally. The pressures and complexities of health care interactions breeds conflicts that require constant, skillful negotiation. Increasingly, health care leaders are recognizing that proficiency at recognizing sources of friction before trouble flares up and at managing and resolving disputes that do break out is an essential part of their executive "toolbox." Resources are now widely available for acquiring fundamental knowledge of dispute prevention and negotiation techniques, and for locating and engaging reliable expertise when third-party intervention appears necessarily to reconcile apparently intractable differences.
Working with a net.
Networking is a critical skill-set that physicians, as they evolve into management and executive positions, need to develop and utilize. A network is a web of personal and professional connections built up over a lifetime based on mutual interests and nurtured by ongoing regular contacts. Good networkers, most especially those for whom bonhomie is not second nature, pursue the project systematically. They set up a schedule for keeping connections alive, they compile and refresh the network database, they attend forums where old acquaintances can be renewed and new ones formed, they follow a set of best practices, and they arm themselves with the essential instruments of the networking trade (primarily a pencil, a business card, and an open attitude). Successful networking requires the ability to ask for favors--but also to extend them willingly. Networking is an exponential process of harnessing connections to connections--one's own network to those of others, to gain knowledge and elicit opportunities that would otherwise be unavailable.
The bionic century. More and more, doctors will be replacing worn-out organs with donor or manufactured body parts.
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Proteomics: the next frontier.
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Confronting the R&D imperative.
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The lack of diversity at the top.
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A better gauge of corporate performance.
Traditional methods of measuring organizational value aren't working very well. Instead, an organization's viability should be gauged from four perspectives, according to Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, co-creators of the Balanced Scorecard. These perspectives--financial strength, customer service and satisfaction, internal operating efficiency, and learning and growth--become the underpinnings of a "balanced" tool with which leaders can assess corporate performance in the knowledge-based marketplace.
Physicians lead the way at America's top hospitals.
The 100 Top hospitals are selected annually based on seven critical parameters for each of the 6,200-plus U.S. hospitals with 25 or more beds. They include the previous year's risk-adjusted patient mortality and complication rates, severity-adjusted average patient lengths of stay, expenses, profitability, proportional outpatient revenue, and asset turnover ratio (a measure of facility and technological pace-keeping ability). The winners are selected from five comparable size groupings--small, medium, large community, teaching, and large academic hospitals. Conspicuous among the winners at every level are physician-led organizations. Even in the majority of hospitals headed by non-physician administrators, however, the managerial capabilities of medical directors are the key to success. The most common characteristic of these award-winning hospitals is that the leadership is working together and communicating the institution's goals effectively to all levels of the organization.
Road signs, gym equipment, child care.
A growing number of health care organizations have expanded their definition of preventive care by supporting community programs. Education, homelessness, poverty, nutrition, physical fitness, drugs, and risky behaviors are some issues being addressed.
One giant leapfrog for health care.
Fed up with skyrocketing health insurance costs, poor quality care and low patient satisfaction, a group of powerful benefits executives from some of the country's largest employers decided to do something about it. They formed The Leapfrog Group, a coalition of companies setting out to build a better American health care system.