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.

February 10th through February 14th:

• Wal-Mart To Open 400 Retail Health Clinics With EHRs - iHealthBeat - WalMart to become an EHR vendor to itself?
• Life as a Healthcare CIO: Always Look on the Bright Side - Terrific guide to being glass 3/4 full. Save as Draft - priceless
• Medicine meets a culture gap - USATODAY.com - American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons is taking a leadership role in cultural competency. The medical profession still struggles with this concept, unfortunately.
• Super Friends - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Who wants to be who in the patient-centered physician world? I’d like to be one of the wonder twins.
• Life as a Healthcare CIO: Web Content Management Systems - Right on to a CIO of an IT Department with this approach: “2008 will be the year of Web 2.0 for all my organizations”

February 4th through February 6th:

• DC Moves for Safer Sidewalks - Get There - Washington government takes a step toward promoting walkability. Sidewalks stay open for business.Walkers rejoice!
• Apple //c - a photoset on Flickr - The OOB experience of an unopened AppleIIc computer. Remember when technology was fun? It still is. And I never even learned to program in Pascal.
• Ryanair’s Changing Altitude - Efficient cost management and charging for everything keeps margins high at RyanAir - a great example of “copy how we think” in terms of being like Southwest
• Running a hospital: More on fetching and work-arounds - BIDMC launches an improvement methodology called SPIRIT. Looks like it’s at least partially based on LEAN?
• The Health Care Blog: Bad Medicine: How The AMA Undermined Primary Care in America - Brian Klepper - Analysis of RBRVS and impact on primary care.
• The ethics of CEO blogging - Nice discussion from Paul Levy about the approach that a CEO takes to blogging. I’m in support!
• Insurers Begin To Reimburse for Online Visits, Concerns Remain - Nice profile of Kaiser Permanente’s program.
• Marriot Rolls Out Web-Based PHR System to Employees Nationwide - iHealthBeat - An employer-sponsored PHR. Will the lack of connection to the health care team be an issue?
• KUOW: Program Archive: Patient Safety, January, 2008 - Dr. Matt Handley, from Group Health Cooperative, is featured
• Best Companies 2008 - FORTUNE Magazine’s Top 100 Employers to Work For - The 2008 list is out. From an HR/Leadership perspective, it is interesting to look at some of the most important qualifications for being on the list, such as support for diversity.