Salesforce Inc is betting big on healthcare, hiring key personnel and ramping up investment in hopes of replacing outmoded medical industry infrastructure and carving out a $1 billion annual business. Its push into healthcare follows years of attempts by rival software providers, including Microsoft Corp, to break into healthcare with everything from personal health records to hospital information systems. They have had mixed results. Now Salesforce aims to bring in $1 billion in yearly revenues in coming years - about a fifth of its current annual sales - from health contracts, two people briefed on its plans told Reuters.
When Uwe Reinhardt noticed pus coming out his son's eye, he panicked. "When he is your firstborn, and you don't know where to go" you worry, Reinhardt, a Princeton healthcare economist, said. It was past 5 p.m. – after hours for his family doctor –so he had to take his son to the emergency room. They waited three hours just to be told that his son had an eye infection and needed a topical cream to treat it – a diagnosis that any doctor could have made. "How is this consumer friendly?" Reinhardt wondered. He is not alone.
In just a few weeks, millions of people will be heading to the federal site HealthCare.gov to shop for medical insurance when a new open-enrollment period begins. If some of those people wind up by mistake atHealthCare.com instead, well, Jeff Smedsrud is fine with that. Smedsrud is chief executive of HealthCare.com, which holds a seemingly invaluable piece of Internet real estate these days. And he's looking to make the most of it. With enrollment in the individual health insurance market re-opening Nov. 15, Smedsrud wants people to direct their browsers to HealthCare.com, where they can shop and compare health plans.
How emotionally intelligent is your doctor? Although answers to this question vary, it is not surprising that physicians' social skills or "EQ" are related to their job performance. After all, regardless of doctors' technical competence, their ability to deal with patients and influence their behavior will depend more on their personality and attitude than what they learned in medical school. But as James Stoller, the Institute Chair for Education at Cleveland Clinic, argued, doctors have not been traditionally selected on their social skills. In fact, given that medical training mostly rewards individual competitiveness and academic knowledge, most doctors are ill-equipped to cater to the human side of patient demands.
A doctor in New York City who recently returned from treating Ebola patients in Guinea became the first person in the city to test positive for the virus Thursday, setting off a search for anyone who might have come into contact with him. The doctor, Craig Spencer, was rushed to Bellevue Hospital Center and placed in isolation at the same time as investigators sought to retrace every step he had taken over the past several days. At least three people he had contact with in recent days have been placed in isolation. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which dispatched a team to New York, is conducting its own test to confirm the positive test on Thursday, which was performed by a city lab.
The Department of Health and Human Services is shuffling its decks amid the fight against the Ebola virus. On Thursday, the agency tapped Karen DeSalvo to become the acting assistant secretary for health, a position that oversees the surgeon general's office — among a long list of others — and plays a heavy role in issues of global health and disaster response. DeSalvo, currently the HHS's national coordinator for health information technology, told staff Thursday that the switch will allow her "to become part of our Department's team responding to Ebola and work ... on other pressing health issues."