HBS: Can the "Masks of Command" Coexist with Authentic Leadership?

Bill George, former Chairman and CEO of Medtronic and now a professor at the Harvard Business School, thinks he knows the answers.

George lays out the elements of "authentic leadership" in his book of the same name. They are:

"(1) pursuing purpose with passion: Authentic leaders must first understand themselves and their passions;

(2) practicing solid values: values are personal, but integrity is required of all leaders;

(3) leading with heart: it means having passion for your work, compassion for the people you serve, empathy for the people you work with, and the courage to make difficult decisions;

(4) establishing enduring relationships: people insist on access to, as well as openness and depth of relationships with, their leaders;

(5) demonstrating self-discipline: this requires accepting full responsibility for outcomes and holding others accountable for their performance."

Gallup: "Americans Consider Crossing Borders for Medical Care"

Hmm ..

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- While domestic healthcare costs are expected to increase to an estimated 21% of GDP by 2010, some Americans may be interested in taking their healthcare spending elsewhere. A recent Gallup Poll finds that up to 29% of Americans would consider traveling abroad for medical procedures such as heart bypass surgery, hip or knee replacement, plastic surgery, cancer diagnosis and treatment, or alternative medical care, even though all are routinely done in the United States.

FYI: AMA medical tourism statement

The AMA advocates that employers, insurance companies, and other entities that facilitate or incentivize medical care outside the U.S. adhere to the following principles:

(a) Medical care outside of the U.S. must be voluntary.

(b) Financial incentives to travel outside the U.S. for medical care should not inappropriately limit the diagnostic and therapeutic

More patients looking at home before going abroad for medical procedures

F.U.D. -- fear, uncertainty, doubt

Galichia Heart Hospital in Wichita, Kan., recently decided that it could break into a market monopolized by overseas hospitals—and offer high-quality, more-convenient care to patients.

In conducting research of medical tourism options in other countries, “we visited hospitals in Singapore, India and the Philippines—the biggest areas drawing Americans,” says Steve Harris, the 85-bed hospital’s CEO.

What the hospital’s administrators found was that the travel experience to these countries “was awful,” Harris says. Recovering from heart surgery or hip replacement, then having to sit for 20 hours on a plane back to the U.S. from some common medical-tourism destinations, isn’t an ideal situation for many patients, he says.

FYI: this week's call list

A start-up's life is never dull. On the sales call-list this week --

• Major SE tribe
• Major SW tribe
• Major GP tribe
• Major provider in India
• Major provider in Thailand
• Major provider in South Korea

1,000,000+ "MedOn" customers?

Today's news: one of the USA's largest, most-trusted member-organizations has agreed to review Medical Onshoring (patent-pending) for usability. If given a positive review, insurers (e.g., Blue Cross/Blue Shield) and venture capitalists would be suitably impressed.

WSJ: Would Developing World’s Low-Cost Strategies Work in U.S.?

In my patent application for Medical Onshoring, I cite the work of Mother Teresa and C.K. Prahalad in India.

I'm not a genius -- I just try to use common sense.

BTW: about the WSJ's concern that being one S.D. from mean is issue -- getting no treatment is right off the chart.

Can cost-effective health-care measures that have worked in poorer countries be applied to in the U.S.?

That’s the question the WSJ asks amid the debate over how the U.S. can reign in health-care costs. It’s become clear that many stakeholders in the debate are in favor of figuring out what treatments and tests are most effective for patients but not limiting care based on cost. Read J&J CEO William Weldon’s letter on this topic in the Washington Post this morning.

One example the WSJ cites is a program run by an AIDS clinic in Alabama that improved its no-show rates dramatically by giving patients prompt appointments and conducting interviews to help determine what factors might make a patient less likely to come back, which mimicks a similar program set up in Zambia.

But many Americans believe that more expensive care is better than cheaper care, says the WSJ. And, there is also the question of whether speed and simplicity — qualities of care often valued in developing countries — mean as much in the U.S., especially if a trade-off is accuracy. For instance, will an $8 device that conducts “a critical blood test” in six minutes time with 90% accuracy, which will be used in India, Brazil and several African nations, supplant the $50 machine used in the U.S. whose accuracy is 97%?

“In the developing world, people are willing to make the trade-off in accuracy for simplicity and low cost,” William Rodriguez, who founded Daktari Technologies, makers of the low-cost device, told the WSJ. “In the U.S., that kind of trade-off is a hard sell.”

WSJ: Parsing the Health Reform Arguments

Some of the shibboleths we've heard in recent weeks don't make much sense.

The health-care debate continues. We have now heard from nearly all the politicians, experts and interested parties: doctors, drug makers, hospitals, insurance companies, even constitutional lawyers (though not, significantly, from trial lawyers, who know full well "change" is not coming to their practices). Here is how one humble economist sees some of the main arguments, which I have paraphrased below:

- "The American people overwhelmingly favor reform."

If you ask whether people would be happier if somebody else paid their medical bills, they generally say yes. But surveys on consumers' satisfaction with their quality of care show overwhelming support for the continuation of the present arrangement. The best proof of this is the belated recognition by the proponents of health-care reform that they need to promise people that they can keep what they have now.