Brian Jackson MD

“We need to discuss what kind of society we want. Technology can accelerate us down a good path or a bad path. The question isn’t always how to engineer better software but how to ensure humans behave more ethically.” --Dr. Yuri Quintana from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, quoted

Hospital (n). From Old French, 13th century. “Hospital” shares etymology with the word “hospitality” which, despite its modern association with restaurant and hotel businesses, originally meant being generous and kind to strangers in need. Every time I hear doctors and healthcare leaders say that the healthcare system needs to shift

This week’s newsletter is inspired by a sermon delivered yesterday at one of my favorite churches, by one of my favorite preachers (the brilliant Rev. Sally Hitchener) She used the biblical story about the exodus of the Israelites to explain the value of an abundance mindset versus a scarcity

Cancer screening has been showing up in the news a lot lately. First, there was Kim Kardashian’s Instagram advertisement for a company named Prenuvo that does full-body MRI scans on healthy people to look for cancers (and anything else they can find). Another company getting attention for cancer-hunting, but

My family and I recently saw the new Oppenheimer movie. The scenes that struck me the most were of the crowds cheering after the Trinity test. How on earth could people have been ecstatic about the creation of the most destructive human-made force in history? But of course they were.

21 July 2023 Photo: Painting of John Harrison (Thomas King, 1767). The original hangs in the Science and Society Picture Gallery in London. For a number of years, Sen Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has been pushing a proposal to replace drug patents with a system of prizes. But the idea didn’

11 July 2023 The latest health data privacy move just came from an unexpected location (unexpected for me, anyway): Nevada. Why Nevada of all places? Part of the answer lies in the current politics of data privacy law. Because of lack of progress in Washington, a number of states have

3 July 2023 When you think about the root causes of dysfunction in US healthcare, what word comes to mind first? A lot of Americans would say cost (or cost inflation). Policy people would likely say access (probably followed by cost). Based on their personal experiences working in healthcare, physicians

26 June 2023 This week, Penn Health became the second health system in the US to opt out of cooperating with the US News and World Report hospital rankings. The first health system to opt out was St. Luke's University Health Network, also in Pennsylvania. In contrast to St. Luke’

12 June 2023 Interesting lawsuit story of the week, courtesy of this StatNews article. On one side are the Connecticut branches of two unions: the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers, and the Sheet Metal Workers International Association. On the other side is Elevance Health, a for-profit insurance company

7 June 2023 (Image: “Barts in Medieval Times” from the Wellcome Collection. St. Bartholemew’s Hospital was one of only two large Catholic hospitals in London that escaped Henry VIII’s “suppression” of religious institutions.) Through most of history, hospitals were run as charities. True, given the pre-scientific state of

25 May 2023 Hot medical journal article of the week, courtesy of JAMA Internal Medicine. This article has been blowing up all over LinkedIn and Twitter. * Here’s what the authors did: They downloaded 195 different questions that had been asked by patients on a Reddit forum, such as “I