To promote our new medical practice (Hello Health) in Brooklyn, New York, we placed a couple of posters in the local subway stop. Our business model is based on making healthcare simple. We are tech-enabled and all about access and communication. We are a community-based medical practice and interested in listening to our patients. A prominent feature of our logo is a voice bubble graphic, signaling to our community that we are different and listening. Our subway posters, designed by the Barbarian Group, are eight voice bubbles with the heading “how do we feel today?”

Shortly after our posters went up, people started telling us how they felt by writing directly on our ads!

It’s great to know that the community I serve as a physician is not simply sick versus healthy. It’s nihilistic, absurd, elated, elongated, and in love. Now this is what I call the start of a meaningful relationship.

BTW, the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) is taking our ads down, claiming they encourage “vandalism.”

More info: Doctors and Patients, Now at Odds, The Barbarian Group

Yesterday, we had our launch event for Hello Health, a lean and tech-enabled medical practice in Williamsburg (NYC) that sets a new standard for consumer-centric care. I’m one of the physicians at Hello Health and also the VP of Medical Affairs. The other two doctors are Devlyn Corrigan and physician-innovator Jay Parkinson, who also functions as the Chief Imagineer for the company. We’ll be accepting new patients in 7-10 days. I’ll write more about the specifics of our operations soon. For now, let’s talk about how we feel today:

Dr. Jauhar wants medical schools to think twice before enrolling older applicants because he believes that “we need more data before we can call this a viable strategy for the future.” He is not just in favor of discriminating against older applicants. He doesn’t think very highly of women either:

… the influx of women into medicine in recent decades has been associated with a change in work habits: today, both male and female doctors are less likely than their predecessors to practice medicine to the exclusion of everything else. A recent survey found that 24% of female physicians under 50 work part-time. This trend has put pressure on older doctors nearing retirement, many of whom bemoan the lack of suitable candidates to take over their practices.

So if you’re an older woman trying to go to medical school, make sure your application doesn’t make it to Dr. Jauhar’s desk, whose article is so out of touch with reality that it actually qualifies for an entertaining read.

Because of the increased efficacy of prasugrel over Plavix, the FDA granted it priority review back in February of this year, promising to announce its decision within six months. The FDA is now delaying its decision and asking for more data and 3 more months to complete its analysis. The bottom line, however, remains that for every one person that we save from a fatal heart attack, one dies from a fatal bleed with prasugrel, giving it a net effect of zero in saving lives and reducing mortality. Now the question becomes if it’s worth spending millions on prasugrel to get such a margin of net real life mortality benefit.

More info: TRITON, FDA Priority Review, FDA Delay

More info: MSNBC

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill

• 90% of physicians say that the proposed decrease in physician reimbursement on all Medicare cases would negatively impact their ability to accept new Medicare patients.
• 63% of physicians indicate cuts would require they reserve less time in their schedules for Medicare patients, while 70% would have to consider switching to a cash-only practice.
• 88% of physicians say financial pressures would impact their ability to care for patients. They also describe the need to increase patient volume and spend less time with patients to offset payment cuts.
• 20% concluded they would need to lay off office staff who provide services to their patients.
• Over 60% of physicians surveyed said they would have to consider changing careers as a result of the increasing financial pressures to provide medical care.
• 99% of physicians responding to the Sermo physician survey agreed that the general public does not understand the bureaucratic and financial struggles physicians face in providing healthcare in the United States.
• 85% of physicians believe that these cuts will make it prohibitive for physicians to accept medicare patients and thus affect patient access to physician care, whether that be specialty or primary care.

More info: Press Release

The game studio Virtual Heroes and the Department of Homeland Security have come together in making a new video game called Zero Hour: America’s Medic, which allows players to respond to terrorist attacks and diagnose and treat patients. Zero hour can be used for training first responders or just for fun.

More info: Virtual Heroes, WIRED

Human doctors are cheap.