Can the PayPal Mafia Fix Health Care?

Last week, the Health 2.0 venture Practice Fusion held its second annual Connect conference in San Francisco. Practice Fusion is an exciting business for a few reasons:

1. It provides a free electronic health record (EHR) to physicians and allied health providers.
2. It's completely independent of the "legacy" health-care business. (Competitors include stalwarts AllScripts and Cerner).
3. It's attracted investment from Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and similarly enterprising tech venture capitalists.  It's now got $40 million of capital.
4. It's lead by a classically heroic entrepreneur: Ryan Howard ran the company on his own credit card for four years, nearly missing payroll, and was only saved by a legal payout related to a motorcycle accident).
5. It got Dr. Farshad Mostafari, MD, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, to give a speech (via Skype) praising private enterprise in Health IT.  And he's an Obama appointee!

There's a lot to like about Practice Fusion.  Read the entire article at Forbes.com's The Apothecary.

Health Spending & The "Supercommittee" Redux

I wrote a shorter version of last month's Health Policy Prescription for John Goodman's Health Policy Blog.  Read it here.

VC's & Rolodexes: Bad Metaphor

This may not actually be blogworthy, but I've been doing some research on a project looking at the how venture-capital investment in biotech and medical devices is influenced by the regulatory environment and keep reading about how a good venture capitalist has a big, fat, thick Rolodex.
What kind of a metaphor is that?

I've met a few VCs in my day and none of them have a Rolodex - nor a manual typerwriter nor green eyeshades!

Time to change the metaphor!

Two New Articles Profile Benjamin Rush Society

Readers know that I am now the Executive Director of the Benjamin Rush Society, a society of medical and pre-med students.  Two recent articles have profiled the Society:

• Avisk Roy of Forbes.com's The Apothecary blog asks whether the Society can change medical education - here.
• Philanthropy Magazine's John J. Miller featured the Society in an article about the growth of student societies in professions heavily impacted by government - here.

Health Care in Texas Under Rick Perry

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram carried my op-ed discussing Rick Perry's limited-government approach to health policy.  Read it here.