Dander Gathering Again: Terzo

It's hard these days to rid oneself of the rising dander. Dander Omnium Gatherum Patch Numero Terzo. To put it more simply, here are more tales from the DOG Patch. And a smattering of actual good (how's this possible?) news.

Double Back on Politics at the VA. There's a guy now installed under Secretary David Shulkin by the name of Darin Selnick. He carries the title of Senior Advisor, and also

Tales from the DOG Patch: Numero Deux

A tip of the hat to Dr. Roy Poses, who did a nice job summarizing the first blast from the DOG Patch. (For those who missed it, it's a distillate of all the dander we've mustered in recent health policy debates as they veer more and more toward the utterly surreal.) Dander omnium gatherum, hurled willy-nilly at the gentle readers of HCRenewal. Ready or not, another dispatch from the DOG Patch.

The Case of the Brew Master's Plot - Was the Veterans Affairs Secretary's Travel Spending Scandalous, or Was He Framed in a Plot to Oust a Political Moderate?

"Come, Watson, come! The brew is afoot."

The Veterans Affairs Secretary's Apparently Scandalous Travel

On February 14, 2018, the Washington Post reported that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Inspector General (IG) severely faulted travel arrangments made for a trip to Europe by the Department's Secretary, Dr David Shulkin.


Veterans Affairs Secretary David J. Shulkin’s chief of staff

Welcome to the DOG Patch: first in a series?

Lately my dander is up so often and so copiously, over what's happening in health care and the world at large, I'm exhausted. Covered with nasty dander. Cowering under the sheets. Others seem to share this dysphoria. But I found if not a cure, at least a palliative. There's so much dander I can scrape it off with a great big shovel and toss as much as I can your way. Here's my first Dander Omnium

New article in J. of General Internal Medicine calls for simplifying EHRs

At my January 31, 2018 Healthcare Renewal blog post "The inevitable downgrading of burdensome, destructive EHRs back to paper & document imaging" at http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-inevitable-downgrading-of.html, I opined that the downgrading of the clinician-facing components of EHRs was essential and inevitable.

A new editorial in the Journal of General Internal Medicine makes

Are You With Us, Dr Gu? - Vanderbilt Suspended Surgical Resident Allegedly Due to Patient's Mother's Compaints About His "Taking a Knee" on Social Media

In the US, our political situation seems to be leading to new threats to free speech in academic medicine. 

Background: Dr Gu's Activism 

 his story was first reported by The Chronicle at Duke University, and here it is in chronological order

Congressional Subpoena about Fetal Tissue Research

Dr Eugene Gu is a pediatric surgical resident at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC).  He

Free Press? Don't Need No Stinkin' Free Press - Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Tries to Intimidate Modern Healthcare Journalist

Remember the good ol' days, when most US challenges to free speech or the free press in health care came from aggrieved corporate or academic managers?  Now government health agencies have gotten into the act, never mind First Amendment guarantees of free speech and a free press.

CMS Attempted to Intimidate a Journalist for Modern Healthcare

This story first appeared on the blog of the

Fish gotta fly, birds gotta swim: more on the opiate crisis

At so many levels, the current opiate crisis, and the way in which various actors are seeking to cope with it, proves rich in intriguing detail.

For starters, it needs to be memorialized that there is a judge in Ohio--like Pennsylvania a fascinating political see-saw state--who's actually trying to do something about this crisis.

Daniel Polster, a Clinton appointee and approaching two decades

Disastrously conceived, managed, and implemented U.S. Coast Guard EHR leaves our Coast Guard heroes safer ... after reversion to paper records

Sometimes, the typical EHR mismanagement debacles that I have been writing about since at least 1999 leave patients safer.  This is one such example.

I note that the contents of this blog, as well as my still-extant Drexel website "Contemporary Issues in Medical Informatics: Good Health IT, Bad Health IT, and Common Examples of Healthcare IT Difficulties" (http://cci.drexel.edu/faculty/