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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.
After a brilliant article on Greece, posted here almost a year ago, Michael “Moneyball” Lewis is back with a look at the other side of the European “equation”: the Germans. It is a huge piece, almost a mini-book, and one can guess what Mr. Lewis probable new book is about: Europe. Great weekend reading.
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?”
What took it so long? Now people can get an internationally-accredited MBA using the same platform they’re already so used to. The people behind this initiative claim that it didn’t take a lot of capex $$ to port their Moodle-based e-learning solution to an Facebook app. We’ve studied online education and while it is definitely not just about the underlying tech, going to Facebook can potentially help some schools leapfrog other schools’ sunken investments in proprietary technologies.
Quick post. This long May 2010 interview with Seth Klarman (by WSJ’s Jason Zweig) is pretty interesting in all regards. While we don’t necessarily agree with everything he says or does, long-time readers of our reports have probably noticed by now that we like to quote his no-B.S. lines – and his famously out-of-print book is a perennial reading list favorite here.
Official immigration decreasing, previously “hot” areas with unprecedented swings, NY’s staggering numbers… Sure, a data point does not a trend make, but demographics are too powerful to ignore as a long-term driver. And it’s hard to argue that the US is well-positioned. This WSJ story has lots of interactive charts and features, and here’s the primary source.
How does “fixing” Toyota (whatever that means) change a country’s demographics time-bomb or its still-rattling financial system? While there are interesting food-for-thought bits in these pieces, they all seem to give way too much importance to “planning a country” in a world where central planning (again, whatever that means) for a country of this size and relatively free market is ever less effective – if it ever was.
