Fast Foreward by
Rick Dana Barlow

STORM TROOPERS. Here in the post-hurricane disaster season with China seemingly consuming much of America’s production capacity (at least that’s how the vendor community justifies their price hikes and baseless fees) when you spot that sales rep or vendor exec VIP drive up in a gleaming new Cadillac Escalade with tinted windows and the oh-so-five-minutes-ago spinning aluminum wheels and low-profile tires, be sure to ask him or her to take you for a ride in the surcharge chariot. Come to think of it, aren’t they already trying to take hospitals for a ride?

OIL SLICKS. Meanwhile, oil company executives defended their multibillion dollar profit earnings as the 2005 hurricane season closed, saying the cash was necessary for continuing operations in an up-and-down marketplace. Think of it like the NBA player’s groaning for contract renegotiations because $10 million a year won’t allow him to feed his family. (Most must be referring to all the out-of-wedlock offspring.) Once the public converts to cars that run on things like electricity or hydrogen (or hey, how about beer or corn syrup?) they’ll need all that surplus cash to offset the subsidies the federal government won’t give them due to declining demand. How spankin’ bankable is that?

CHOP PHOOEY. With nary any help from a GPO, former small-manufacturing crusader and GPO-basher (retired once it received the GPO contracts it craved) Retractable Technologies Inc. saw its stock skyrocket 50 percent when news of a major contract with the Chinese government surfaced. RTI signed a three-year licensing deal with a government-designated and sanctioned company to make and sell RTI safety syringes in exchange for royalty payments. The deal reportedly could generate between $10 million and $14 million in revenue by the second year of the contract, according to a report in the Dallas Morning News. Ironically, the newspaper also reported that RTI has yet to turn an operating profit. Guess all that whining to the federal government about alleged anticompetitive practices by GPOs and major competitors, as well as the multimillion-dollar contracts and settlements with GPOs and major competitors barely plugged a black hole. Back stateside, crafters of the "new" HIGPA immediately began scheming on how to launch a fee-for-service GPO model in Beijing. Hmmm…maybe those claims of demand in China’s aren’t so far-fetched after all.

DUPED DUMPING. With product recalls continuing to plague Boston Scientific Corp. do you think Johnson & Johnson executives secretly snicker that Boston Scientific and Guidant Corp. are so much more of a match than that last-minute mismatch with their company? It’s not like Guidant’s recall problems represented shocking news that any 12-year-old with an Internet connection couldn’t find.

JAN: MEDICAL APOLOGETICS. Harvard Medical School’s major teaching hospitals are developing a new policy to openly acknowledge medical errors "and other bad results" to their patients and apologize for them. One registered nurse (with nearly four decades of experience) who supports the measure commented on a message board that this will only result in nurses going to all-day "I’m sorry" classes and inservices to do the dirty work for the doctors. Why? "Because hospitals see healthcare as all about consumers...Nurses see healthcare as all about the patients...but doctors see healthcare as all about THEM." Ouch. Harsh, perhaps, but true. In an essay published in The New York Times in late July (Ed. – Find it in the August headlines of "Around The Nation" on HPN Online) the author, a doctor, revealed that there’s a good reason why physicians have resisted this: "…doctors have always been tight-lipped about their mistakes, in part to preserve an illusion of medical omnipotence." He argues that such honesty "humanizes them and builds trust." The next sentence he wrote, which capped his essay, ought to make doctors and lawyers pause and quake.

IT CLIQUE. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA), all presidential aspirants by the way, have teamed up with trusty sidekick Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) to push for bipartisan legislation for electronic health record adoption and implementation. Expect to hear and read a lot of rhetorical and conflicting nonsense at least through the 2008 presidential election and then nothing until we close in on then former President Bush’s 2014 EHR deadline with very little progress made. At least, that’s what critics will argue.

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