The 11th quote is a straggler that I missed from my list last year (here), but felt it warranted inclusion this year.
#1 – "When it comes to health, your zip code matters more than your genetic code." Dr. Tony Iton – The California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships 2013 [as tweeted by @taralohan here at #cehjf13]
#2 – "I think the biggest problem with healthcare today is not its cost – which is a big problem – but for all that money, it’s not an expression of our humanity." Jonathan Bush – CEO,
#3 – "Don’t come to us telling us you can upload [data] into our electronic medical record. We don’t necessarily want it there ... our physicians don’t want it all there. They really don’t need to know how much exercise each of their patients is getting on a daily basis; they just don’t have time to process all of that." Christine Folck – Lead Innovation Designer, Kaiser Permanente [as quoted in mobihealthnews article July 9, 2013 here]
#4 – "If we’re going to get people to wear sensors, they either have to be gorgeous or invisible." Sonny Vu – Founder/CEO of Misfit Wearables [Rock Health Innovation Summit here]
#5 – "More than 50 percent (of our MinuteClinic patients) are effectively medically homeless. Patients at MinuteClinic did as well or better than those treated in traditional primary care settings, yet cost was 40 to 80 percent lower than in other settings." Andrew J. Sussman, MD – President, MinuteClinic and Senior Vice President/Associate CMO,
#6 – "If you think about how healthcare is delivered, it’s on an ad hoc basis. Someone comes into a hospital, someone comes into a pharmacy, someone comes into a doctor. But beyond those touchpoints, the patients are on their own. There’s no real continuity of care." Christopher A. Viehbacher – CEO,
#7 – "We have to be very careful not to blame the patients. A lot of the conversation [around patient engagement] has been, how do we get them to do stuff? To me, that’s not engagement." Victor Montori, MD – Director of Healthcare Delivery Research and Professor of Medicine at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine [in his closing keynote at MedCity's ENGAGE event as reported by MedCity here]
#8 – "80% of health apps are abandoned within two weeks." Marco Della Torre – VP of Product Science, Basis Science, Inc. (7th Annual USC Body Computing Conference – PDF here)
#9 – [referencing the rollout of Healthcare.gov] " ... the fact is it didn't happen in the first month, the first six weeks, in a way that was at all acceptable. And since I'm in charge, obviously, we screwed it up." President Obama – December 20th Press Conference (Washington Post transcript here)
#10 – "The ACA is an ugly patch on an ugly system – and I don’t think it’s worth mentioning in the context of price or quality transparency." Uwe E. Reinhardt – Professor of Political Economy at Princeton University from his presentation at The National Summit on Health Care Price, Cost and Quality Transparency (here)
This year's "extra" quote is actually from a PBS Frontline segment that first aired in June of last year. I had occasion to watch the broadcast again a few weeks ago – and regret not including some reference to the quote (or show) in 2012. It really does highlight how important dentistry is in the lives (and future) of our kids – and then also the larger effect of dentistry on our healthcare system as a whole.
#11 – "There are nearly 1 million Americans who visit the emergency room each year because of dental pain at a cost that runs into the hundreds of millions." Miles O'Brien – Science Correspondent, PBS NewsHour (from the Frontline Segment – Dollars and Dentists, June, 2012 here)
