At the restaurant Slow Club in San Francisco, we were greeted with this notice when our bill arrived. I think this is a novel and interesting way to bring price transparency to health care. It’s especially interesting that in San Francisco, there’s probably more price transparency coming from this restaurant than from the industry itself (see the middle link from this post about that). I suggest that they go one step farther and publish the health care cost component of every menu item. This just may help spur more consumer interest in the accountable, affordable, evidence-based care system.

The other photograph is of a few jets from the airline people are tired of hearing me talk about, VirginAmerica.

February 15th through February 16th:

The first few links are from the history of diversity in various industries’ and their impact on quality, affordability, and safety.

• “Fly Me” - TIME - National Airlines pleads innocence in 1971 to the “Fly Me” campaign despite flight attendant protests.
• Classic TV Commercial Jingles: Braniff presents “The Air Strip” - A commercial dubbed “outrageously sexist” for its portrayal of flight attendants.
• Coffee, Tea or Tails? - TIME - Article from 1974 about Continental’s “We Move our Tails For You” ad campaign
• Health Care Renewal: GE: We Bring More Conflicts (of Interest) to Light - An example of a purchaser that struggles with supporting an affordable care system, and supporting an un-affordable care system at the same time.
• No Pharma Funding | When Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City stopped accepting commercial support for its continuing medical education activities last January, many at the institution had their doubts that the program would survive - CME without industry support is possible. I would tend to favor events that are less fancy and have less bias.
• apophenia: open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academic journals - A more assertive argument around locked down journals.
• Running a hospital: You can take your $15 fee and … ! - I wonder how relevant peer review is in general. I am going to start a tag cloud on this and keep track.

• Health IT Pioneer Calls for Changes in Federal Health IT Strategy - iHealthBeat - More changes requested in federal involvement around Health IT
• JAY PARKINSON + MD + MPH on Carol - Jay says it isn’t going to work. I’m not sure it will either as I think about what Apple had to do to create the iPhone. I found the CEO’s ideas compelling. We should start with what’s best for those we serve and figure out a way to make it work.
• ChangeThis Newsletter: 42.05 Ideaicide: How To Avoid It And Get What You Want by Alan Parr and Karen Ansbaugh - I would call this a nice primer on “Nemawashi” - or conversations around the office to get ideas off the ground.
• A Food Fight Over Calorie Counts - Interested more in the approach to sharing information than the issue of calorie counts (per se) - that “consumer confusion” is used as the reason to not provide information.
• Chapter 70.02 RCW: Medical records ? health care information access and disclosure - Background information; Transparency Law in Washington State
• Forrester?s Top Health-IT Predictions for 2008 ? Digital Healthcare and Productivity - Clinical analytics, EHRs gain a greater toehold, RHIOs will take a little longer. My experience in the field seems to resonate.
• The Health 2.0 Blog: Carol aims to disrupt the health care market by Matthew Holt - There’s that “d” word again, in reference to Carol.com. Can they do it? If we think about creating patient-centered HIT systems, why wouldn’t we include cost information as part of the Information part of HIT?