Ballmer’s busy day in Nashville
Posted on November 19, 2009 at 7:50 am
If you’re not in on the Tech Council’s Jan. 20 membership breakfast featuring Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, not to fear. The Nashville Health Care Council is taking advantage of the high-profile visit by scheduling some face time with Ballmer for its own members in the form of a panel discussion on health care IT. Though it will likely be a lunch event, the time and location are still being finalized.
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The Silicon Valley of healthcare: a dissident view
Posted on September 2, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Liberal stalwart Bill Moyers has aired a segment that takes a swipe at Nashville’s healthcare industry, with a little help from veteran Nashville physician and author Clifton Meador.
Meador, executive director of the Meharry-Vanderbilt Alliance and a former chief medical officer of Saint Thomas Hospital, uses the Nashville Health Care Council’s annual corporate family tree to illustrate the city’s “massive, industrial health complex.”
Even the background music is Lefty….
DR. CLIFTON MEADOR: This is Marilyn [sic: Maryland] Way. Marilyn Way is a center road of Marilyn Farms. Marilyn Farms is a huge complex. The predominant business in here is health care corporations of one sort or another. This goes on and on for over a mile here and this is not called for-profit hospital row, or anything like that, but this, this is the equivalent of the music row that we went down for the recording industry.
SONG: If you’ve got the money, honey, I’ve got the time. We’ll go honky tonkin’. We’re gonna have a time. But if you run short of money, I’ll run short of time. ‘Cause you with no more money, honey, I’ve no more time.
DR. CLIFTON MEADOR: This is titled “The Nashville Health Care Industry, The Family Tree 2006.” Every little square here is a health care business industry or spin-off. We have 3 mother corporations here: HCA, which is the Hospital Corporation of America, spun off all of these. Hospital Affiliates, which is a spin-off of HCA, spun off all of these. And Health Trust, which is a spin of Hospital Affiliates and HCA, spun off all of these. So this is a massive, industrial health complex that’s headquartered here in Nashville.
MAGGIE MAHAR: After World War II, while other countries let their government begin to intervene in health care to make sure everyone got care, to regulate it to make sure it was good care, in this country doctors very, very strongly opposed any government involvement or anyone being involved in telling a doctor what to do. After Medicare was passed in 1965, elderly patients were getting far more care than they had been before then.
Then that’s when our industrial medical complex, I would say, took off. By the early 70s, there were so much money involved that suddenly people began to say, “You know what? Medicine is too important to be managed by doctors. We all know doctors are bad managers. What we need are businessmen managing health care.” And that’s when health care went from being physician centered and controlled, to a large degree, by doctors to being controlled by the corporation and the CEOs of those corporations.
And, over time, more and more the CEO of the Hospital would not even be somebody with a MD. He would be somebody with a MBA. And CEOs bent on growth, bent on higher quarterly earnings, quarter after quarter, and year after year, are always pushing for more sales, more revenues, more and more and more. It produces more. But more may not be better for our health.
Leadership Health Care sets ‘09-’10 board
Posted on August 27, 2009 at 8:40 amThe organization that seeks to unite the next generation of Nashville health care leaders has put together its leadership team for the coming year. Bo Bartholomew, president and CEO of PharmMD, is chairman for 2009-2010, while Melissa Waddey, COO of Summit Medical Center, is vice chair.
The remainder of the board includes:
• Clint Adams, chief accounting officer, Ardent Health Services
• Kelvin Ault, vice president of tax, Vanguard Health Systems
• Chris Bangerter, corporate compliance officer, LifePoint Hospitals
• Laura Beth Brown, president, Vanderbilt Home Care Services
• Molly Cate, partner, Jarrard Phillips Cate & Hancock
• Sarah Cook, director of account management, Healthways
• Leon Dowling, founder and CEO, IMI Health
• Ryan Doyle, manager of business development, Health Care REIT
• Jim Kinser, regional director of provider networks, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee
• James Lakes, senior industry solutions strategist, Healthcare Providers, Microsoft
• Ken Marlow, partner, Waller Lansden Dortch & Davis
• Kearstin Patterson, director of corporate communications, BioMimetic Therapeutics
• Steve Verner, associate, Gresham Smith & Partners.
Paul Asper, a student in the Healthcare MBA Program at the Vanderbilt Owen School of Management, also joins the group in a one-year student board seat.
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Health care: A little bit country or a little bit rock ‘n’ roll?
Posted on May 18, 2009 at 2:34 pm
There’s something smoldering in Cleveland. And no, it’s not the Cuyahoga River. It’s bitter gnawing jealousy.
In an utterly asinine quote, which this reporter somehow managed to miss the first time through the Cleveland NewsNet5 item, Cuyahoga County Commissioner Peter Lawson Jones stated the following:
“I’m not terribly worried about the boast and the brag of those from Nashville. If we were building something for the Grand Ole Opry, they would have the edge on us. But Nashville is not known as an epicenter for health care as we are.”
While you let the mind-boggling hilarity of that sink in, we’ll go ahead and suggest that officials from the Nashville Health Care Council add Commissioner Jones’ name to its distribution list for the 2009 Health Care Family Tree. And maybe they could even staple a little note to it saying something like, “Your move, chief!”
To say that Nashville is not an epicenter of health care simply defies logic. Without getting into the broader issues involved, it makes nothing other than perfect sense that such a development would naturally seek out Nashville.
It’s not like they were out to make a television vehicle for this guy or a movie about a perennially down-and-out, yet lovable baseball team. Because in those cases, Cleveland might have an edge on us.
A virtual trade mission to India
Posted on April 28, 2009 at 1:53 pmThe Nashville Chamber, Tech Council and Health Care Council will next month host a day-long series of sessions exploring trade opportunities with India.
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