February Tweethearts

Tweets are getting to the heart of the matter in 140 characters or less. Here are my February tweethearts to date.

• Health Reform: The Computer's Potential to Improve Health Care - Don’t let IBM Watson’s victory on Jeopardy fool you. The computer will not replace doctors and does not address most patient concerns.

• Health Reform's Open Frontier: Achieving , Monitoring and Supporting Patient Compliance - Many bad health outcomes stem from patient behavior and lack of compliance with doctor’s orders once patients leave the doctor’s office.

• Obamacare: Between a Rock (Individual Mandate) anda Hard Place (Its Constitutionality) - Supreme Court: Decide Individual Mandate issue soon. Time, money, and resources are a’wasting. We can live with consequences.

• Note to Federal Government: Beware of What You Wish for - Government wishes doctors and hospitals would join accountable care organizations (ACOs) to save money, yet the opposite may occur.

• Egypt, The Social Media, and Health 2.0 – Twitter and Facebook will personalize and individualize care rather than mobilizing consumers to change the system downside up as in Egypt.

• The Reform Mindset and The Many Faces of Health Care “Fragmentation”- Health reform should be more about increasing decentralization and customizing care than reducing fragmentation.

• Health Reform: Private Practice Endangered – According to a Physicians Foundation physician survey, health reform is contributing to the decline of private practice.

• Health Reform: Addressing Primary Care Shortages – 3 articles in New England Journal of Medicine offer recipes to solve primary care shortages, all of which will take time and are untested.


• Health Reform: Who’s in Charge Here? - The U.S. Government or State Government - Politicians in D.C. are going for broke. Meanwhile State governments are simply going broke.

• Health Reform No-No’s, The Case of EHRs – Why are doctors so slow in adopting EHRs? EHRs take $30,000 to install, $10,000 a year to maintain, and cut time spent with patients, about 30%.

• Health Reform and the Dark Side of the Internet - The Internet has two sides – it frees us to find everything, but it can be used to control our personal and professional lives.

• Consequences of Health Reform - In my unpublished book Good Intentions: Consequences of Health Reform, I say good intentions to reform aren’t enough for most Americans

• Senate Will Vote on Repeal - Judge Roger Vinson ruled the law unconstitutional, but Democrats still rule the Senate institutional. Voters will note who voted for what

• Blue Monday for Obamacare - On Friday, Judge Roger Vinson ruled the individual mandate as unconstitutional. The entire Act must be declared void. Today is Monday.

• Why I Write Blogs - I write blogs because I enjoy words, I have a political purpose, and I want to make a difference in the lives of patients and doctors.