A note from a reader posed this question.

Although I find the articles you link to interesting and probably would never see them if you didn’t I do not understand why you don’t link to more bloggers and other online stuff instead of the NY Times, Fortune, Wired, Inc, etc.

He obviously does read me, since that’s a very accurate list of media to which I frequently link, so it’s a fair question.

I partly answered it in an old post referring to what I term the games required by social media, but there are much larger reasons—facts, depth and veracity.

Let me give you an example.

On August 6^th the NYT published an article about HCA, a giant for profit hospital chain taken private by a group of private equity firms and since gone public again. HCA was involved in a Medicare fraud case and paid $1.7 billion in fines and repayments; now it’s back on the hot seat for performing unnecessary cardiac procedures to drive up profits.
(The bold is mine.)

Details about the procedures and the company’s knowledge of them are contained in thousands of pages of confidential memos, e-mail correspondence among executives, transcripts from hearings and reports from outside consultants examined by The Times, as well as interviews with doctors and others. A review of those communications reveals that rather than asking whether patients had been harmed or whether regulators needed to be contacted, hospital officials asked for information on how the physicians’ activities affected the hospitals’ bottom line.

A week later The Times followed up with another article showing how HCA has become a role model for hospital profitability; not better care, but more money.

I’m sure the blogging and commentary world that follows Medicare and healthcare in general has been weighing in, but what they don’t do is the research.

They don’t have the time, money, skill, patience and probably not the desire to wade through the paperwork.

So-called old media also seems to set the ethical bar higher and with greater consequences to those who choose to lie and cheat.

Finally, bloggers and commentators read these investigative stories and offer their opinions and spin on them just as I do.

Many of these have good value, it’s just that I would rather discuss and opine on the original than comment on the commentary.

Flickr image credit: IvanWalsh.com

So much of Twitter use in the US is banal, but the rest of the world is finding serious use for those 134 characters, like fighting crime. An administrative chief in a Kenyan village does just that using it to find stolen cows or sheep and even thwart a home invasion.

When the administrative chief of this western Kenyan village received an urgent 4 a.m. call that thieves were invading a school teacher’s home, he sent a message on Twitter. Within minutes residents in this village of stone houses gathered outside the home, and the thugs fled.

It’s fortunate that I’m extremely healthy, because I’m not a lover of the medical world. Individuals do great things, but I don’t trust the profession as a whole and those feelings have been reinforced by the secrecy surrounding the connections between doctors and pharmaceutical companies, but that’s about to change.

Under the new standards, if a company has just one product covered by Medicare or Medicaid, it will have to disclose all its payments to doctors other than its own employees. The federal government will post the payment data on a Web site where it will be available to the public.

Household vinegar has long been the go-to ingredient for a host of household cleaners and solutions to everyday problems (just ask Heloise). Now humble, cheap vinegar is saving lives (not in the US, of course).

…a remarkably simple, brief and inexpensive procedure, one with the potential to do for poor countries what the Pap smear did for rich ones: end cervical cancer’s reign as the No. 1 cancer killer of women. The magic ingredient? Household vinegar.

Crowdsourcing is making waves in many areas, from funding startups to improving government processes to jump-starting medical innovation. Who knew?

“Offering a $100,000 prize has yielded ideas in six months that would have taken four to five years to develop at ten times the cost,” said Sanofi’s Dennis Urbaniak, VP US diabetes.

If you read nothing else today I hope you read this final link and consider registering. After all, can’t hurt and could save a life.

Q: What do you get when you combine a driving entrepreneur with a mission and an algorithm?
A: The National Kidney Register and the longest domino set of transplant surgeries to date; 64 to be exact!

Chain 124, as it was labeled by the nonprofit National Kidney Registry, required lockstep coordination over four months among 17 hospitals in 11 states. It was born of innovations in computer matching, surgical technique and organ shipping, as well as the determination of a Long Island businessman named Garet Hil, who was inspired by his own daughter’s illness to supercharge the notion of “paying it forward.”

Flickr image credit: pedroelcarvalho

I guess it’s pretty egotistical, but one of the links I’m giving you today is mine.

It’s is a quick read, but really useful; a guest post I did for Catch Your Limit Consulting, a strategic management and marketing firm, called Hate The Plan, Love The Planning. Let me know what you think.

The second one is an article you’ll probably be hearing a lot about. No matter what you think of the content, the question is whether John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, should have stepped into the political wasp nest of healthcare. After you read the article, be sure to click the comment tab at the top and scan through some of them. Interesting reading.

And please take a minute to share your favorite business OMG moments for the chance to win a copy of Jason Jenning’s Hit The Ground Running.

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Image credit: nono farahshila on flickr

It’s one of those odds and ends day, no unifying theme, but some good stuff.

Phil Gerbyshak sent me a link to an interesting post by his friend Roy Atkinson. Roy talks about speedership—the need to act quickly in today’s world. Roy sees it as a requirement for a positional leader, which it is, but I see it as an attitude that everybody needs these days.

Click over to the slideshow at Business Week and learn what experts are saying about how leadership has changed.

Next, in case you hadn’t heard, one of the newest social media trends are Facebook suicides, as in killing your profile. Click the link and see why people are choosing to kill their profile.

Finally, something for you to think about. What happens when doctors start treating medicine as a business? What does it mean for the future of medicine, not healthcare, in this country?

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Image credit: nono farahshila on flickr