Jen’s Posterous

What if your long-term health profile were a corporate asset of your health plan? What if, when you changed health plans, the new health plan had to pay the old health plan for the rights to insure you? Call this a health plan member's Net Asset Value.

From: "The Health Care Blog: Sell Patients like Baseball Players - Seriously ."

If I'm a 'star' patient with an MVP long term health profile (great biometric stats, low risk, great genetic indicators, etc) then health insurers should approach me (and my chosen agent) like the next Great Bambino, and attempt to woo me to their plan with a long term contract and low rates.

Interesting idea, but this would build a system that's predisposed against the sick, and getting ill isn't a bit like having a ton of talent in baseball.

Luckily, the Dutch system provides some examples of how we may do this right...provide MORE incentives for treating those who are sick to insurers and hospitals, not less (paying attention CMS?) so people want those kind of MVPs in their portfolios too.

The idea of health insurers controlling and trading my net asset value at will, to be sold and resold without my control like my student loan balances, makes me a commodity good in the healthcare marketplace.

And how, actually, is that any different than the scenario we've got today?

Take a look - data like whoa. Also note user friendly, non 1998 Windows fabulous user interface.

We're getting there, slowly but surely...

From: "Technology Review: Blogs: Delta-V: Designing Astronaut Gloves."

But this is one of them. Testing gloves that protect astronaut digits from the outer limits.

Speaking of the final frontier, imagine if US healthcare had a body like NASA in the 50s. Recruit the brightest engineers, rouse everyone for a mission impossible, and test every component, even a glove, with this level of exacting reason and an expectation that failure is not an option.

If we won't lose a man or woman in space, why is it ok to lose a man or woman in the hospital as a result of medical error?

We need a duct tape solution for healthcare. I'm betting it's engineers in the Valley who will figure out how to solve American healthcare's Apollo 13 scenario.

From: "Face value: Salesman of the irrational | The Economist."

Lessons from Jean-Claude Biver, Hublot watches:

1. Make your own stuff. Sell it if you must, but dole it out with due process to people you love and respect. Be master of your cheese, til the last piece is gone.

"His cheese can send the authors of Michelin guidebooks into rapture; Switzerland’s best chefs regularly call him begging for some. But he parcels it out only to family and friends, and to restaurants that he particularly likes. And he always refuses payment for the stuff. “If I don’t sell it,” explains Mr Biver, “then I will decide who gets it and who doesn’t. I will be the master of my cheese until the last piece.”"

2. A little bit of rationality helps sell irrationality.

" “You only desire what you cannot get,” he says. “People want exclusivity, so you must always keep the customer hungry and frustrated.”"

Not sure I agree on the need for hungry and frustrated customers...the Posterous crew does an amazing job of keeping me full and unfrustrated, and I respect them (and the tech/design that enables my Posterous experience) the more for it.

However, I did also hear recently advice to always have something go wrong at a conference (lose the wifi, turn down the heat, etc) so that organizers have control over what people are complaining about.

Personally, I'll go with the glass half full view and trust users over manipulating them every time.

But being master of your own product - and knowing when and why you sell it versus give it away - is a good gut check question to ask yourself in the mirror every morning.

From: "LeaderGap.jpg 640×476 pixels."

Minus 10 points for general 'composure.' :)

To sum it all up, successful entrepreneurs live in a distorted reality that they create for themselves. They have a vision that they pursue like food during a famine. Satisfaction is rare and never immediate. To be a successful entrepreneur, you need to live in a world that doesn't exist yet: the world that you want to create.

From: "Chrys Bader - Tales of an Entrepreneur."

On average, a patient admitted to an academic hospital with a heart attack had a cumulative effective radiation dose of 14.5 millisieverts -- about a third the annual maximum accumulation permitted for workers in nuclear power plants.

The average American can expect to receive about 3 millisieverts a year from ground radon or flying in an airplane.

From: "Just one heart attack leads to 725 X-rays | Health | Reuters."

"When the women were just looking at pictures of their partner, they actually reported less pain to the heat stimuli than when they were looking at pictures of an object or pictures of a stranger," said study co-author Naomi Eisenberger, assistant professor of psychology and director of UCLA's Social and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory. "Thus, the mere reminder of one's partner through a simple photograph was capable of reducing pain."

"This changes our notion of how social support influences people," she added. "Typically, we think that in order for social support to make us feel good, it has to be the kind of support that is very responsive to our emotional needs. Here, however, we are seeing that just a photo of one's significant other can have the same effect."

From: "Can thinking of a loved one reduce your pain?" via @Physorg

The way electronic medical records are used now has not yet had a real impact on the quality or cost of health care,” said Dr. Ashish K. Jha, an assistant professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, who led the research project.

From: "Little Benefit Seen, So Far, in Electronic Patient Records - NYTimes.com."

Between CEOs earning exorbitant salaries and news of frequent patient policy cancellations, the public, and many within the healthcare industry itself, are expressing outrage over the huge profits that health insurance companies continue to enjoy, and are increasingly casting the insurance industry as the villians in the health reform debate. 

But just how well are these companies really doing?

From: "Q3: Top Health Insurance Company Earnings Reports - FierceHealthFinance - Health Finance, Healthcare Finance."

Whoops - forgot to add health insurance to the startup budget....;)