Have a good design idea for a product to help manage diabetes? Want some help (i.e., prize money, access to design experts, introductions to venture funders, etc.) with turning your idea into a real product?
If so, enter the 2010 DiabetesMine™ Design Challenge before April 30, 2010.
Last year’s grand prize winner was a design to [...]

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I would have to say that I have a generally cheery, optimistic, “can do” disposition that is somewhat tempered by my belief that we have to persevere through adversity brought on by those who subscribe to a variety of reactionary attitudes. (My endearing, sarcastic cynicism stems — most likely — from the recognition that [...]

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Updated on 5 March 2010 at 8:30AM: I added a few more questions that were written down at the office.
It seems like I have a lot of answers about healthcare, but I really don’t. However, I do have some anecdotes and a few facts. And I have done some research when prompted or [...]

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There are three questions I ask whenever I look at potential healthcare changes:

How will it improve patient health outcomes?
How will it contain or reduce the cost of healthcare?
How will it increase access to healthcare for all Americans?

The first question focuses on the basic purpose of medicine: making or keeping us healthy. In general, it [...]

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I wanna model.

Modeling Sucks – Handsome Boy …
No, not that kind of modeling. And I don’t want one of those other kinds of models, either. (Although it’s certainly nice to watch Heidi Klum every week on Project Runway.)

I want to develop a model that helps me figure out how to balance exercise, insulin, [...]

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From Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, p. 44:
In December 2006, the Keystone Initiative [which used checklists in the ICU and integrated executives to help remove roadblocks] published its findings in a landmark article in the New England Journal of Medicine. Within the first three months of the project, the [...]

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Update from the day after: Just so that everyone knows, I’m not singling out any specific people or any particular party. I’m only angry at Congress and the pundits who are more concerned with scoring political points than with improving an obviously broken, expensive system. It’s true that I was angry when I [...]

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Dear readers, it’s time for a roundup of topics that just aren’t big enough for their own posts. I’m just going to jumble them all together. Enjoy!
It’s Olympics time. Woo! I don’t understand people who profess not to love the games. You may not like every event — bobsled, ice [...]

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If you don’t already subscribe to the New York Times‘ Idea of the Day weblog, you should.
(If I weren’t at work with a lot to do, I’d write about how it aggregates some of the best articles in print from the web concerning culture and the life of the mind. I’d say something about [...]

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We use checklists a lot at work. They help us reduce waste and ensure a high quality product. If we’ve run into a problem before, we’re likely to run into it again, so we might as well go down the checklist of “Did you think about this?” and “Did you do that?” items [...]

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This evening I went to the MFA to see the current exhibits. I was delighted by all of the daily life figurines that were part of the Tomb 10A exhibit. The Harry Callahan exhibit was small but enjoyable, and it was my first time seeing Dürer’s Melencolia in real life. (See picture [...]

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So far, I’ve looked at how much my prescriptions cost (almost $6,000 per year) and how much the rest of my health care costs (about $7,100 or $4,250 depending on who you ask). Adding those numbers up, you get $10,250 – $13,100. My share is a bit higher than the American average of [...]

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It took me forever to upgrade from Wordpress 2.2. (Thanks, Internets, for not hacking my site.) After almost obliterating my web log in the upgrade process — thank g-d for backups and reversible changes — I’m now running 2.9.1, and it looks really great.
Now on to bigger and better things.

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My auntie’s husband — I guess that would make him my uncle — baited me on Facebook into debating healthcare reform. I’ve been a bit coy discussing here what I would like to see in a healthcare reform package, preferring to lay out enough evidence to make my case plausible. But having been [...]

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At midday yesterday my carpool buddy and I looked at the weather map, saw a scary blob of impending frozen doom, and decided to heed the Governor’s advice to go home. But the snow that was forecast — the blizzard that was supposed to mess up the evening commute — never really materialized here [...]

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