Happy Thanksgiving

I will be on vacation for a few days for the Thanksgiving holiday.  Blogging will resume on Monday.   For each new morning with its light, For rest and shelter of the night, For health and food, for love and friends, For everything Thy goodness sends. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

What makes patients choose your hospital?

Patients choose hospitals based on the quality of the medical care they receive and the hospital’s distance from their home.  But what nonclinical criteria do patients value most?  The Salud y Gestión blog reviews the findings of a study in The McKinsey Quarterly.  The study found that patients rank the following as the most important…

The Underuse of Overuse Research

Health economics, physicians and health services researchers have found that overuse, not underuse, is the major problem for many medical services.  Yet you rarely here a campaign to reduce that quantity of medical care provided.  Why is this? An editorial in Health Services Research gives two important explanations for this.  First, measuring overuse is difficult.…

The Hiring of An Economist

I am currently on the “Job Market.”  I will receive my Ph.D from UC-San Diego this spring and hope to have a job for next fall.  There are lots of advice papers on what graduate students should do to maximize their chances of getting a job.  Yet few graduate students ever learn what the labor…

Flushed

I just finished reading an interesting book on plumbing.  I can just see that I lost half my readers with that last sentence.  How can plumbing be interesting? It turns out that if you are interested in health, you must be interested in plumbing.  Disposing of human waste is one of the biggest health problems,…