Healthcare
Interesting, short interview with Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush. A reminder of the sometimes almost insurmountable barriers of inefficient habits and practices in some sectors. The potential for IT-based revolutions in healthcare is huge, however the questions of “when” and “how” are still hard to answer. Yet keeping track of the “cost control/ accountability” trend in HC is vital.
A NYT article highlights research being done on aging at MIT and in other places, in which the idea behind the effort is no longer just for medical or policy-making, macro-economic, demographic-challenge stuff: it’s about senior citizens as a consumer force to be reckoned with, and how to market for them. As one person says in the article: “If you are a Fortune 100 company, or an inventor in a garage, where are you going to find another demographic that is that large, that robust in spending power, that open to new possibilities, and that underserved?”
Our hopes for mankind were renewed when we received a great suggestion by a reader today. Better yet, this reader has sent great stuff before and this is no exception. Keep those suggestions coming! We have the full BBC documentary with global health professor Hans Rosling inside. There’s also more on Hans Rosling and data visualization, including tips on how to build your own presentation with this data.
Now that the U.S. Healthcare bill has passed and just been signed into law, it’s interesting to notice the amount of noise generated in the past two days. Newspaper and sell-side reports are booming with articles and so-called analysis of what this means to investors, but right now it’s probably better to “do something by doing nothing”.
Motivated by the recent LBO of IMS Health by TPG (the private equity group) and Canada Pension Plan, here’s an excerpt from our Q3 2009 report in which we discussed the company. We had been looking at it at least since 2007, when we started to look at the healthcare industry globally. Right after our text we link to other interesting articles on the deal.
