Isn’t it Time to Stop Accepting Handouts for our Educational Efforts?
Commercial support for continuing education risks distorting educational content, invites bias, and endangers professional commitment to evidence-based decision making. The Permanente Medical Groups are leading a ban on commercial support for accredited organizations that provide continuing education, especially because it is not the size of the gift, but the gifting itself that creates the desire to reciprocate. article>> | pdf >>

Dealing With Change: Using the Conditional Change Model for Clinical Research.
Virtually all clinical medicine is about change. In clinical research one of the most frequently used approaches—to compare changes in a treated group with corresponding changes in a control group—fails to include the baseline measurement value in the analysis. Reasons to prefer the conditional change model over the t-test are: smaller error, similar groups, and less artifact. article>> | pdf >>

The Merging of the Work of Two Pioneers: Dr Weed & Dr Berwick
Attaining Comprehensive Health Care Improvement is Imperative.
Two physicians are on journeys to improve health care. Lawrence Weed, MD (problem-oriented medical record) explores how practitioners process and apply information, using “knowledge couplers” for decisions based on quality data input rather than on recall. Donald Berwick, MD believes that the key to higher quality is understanding and improving 100 core work-flow processes covering 95% of all patient care. We need both approaches. article>> | pdf >>