aaron c beals

a recent post on WBUR’s CommonHealth blog, written by our executive director, Rebecca Weintraub:

http://commonhealth.wbur.org/guest-contributors/2009/12/life-saving-health-information-a-global-necessity/

interested in global health? we’re looking for an RA.

Jon Payne — who is doing some work with us here at the Global Health Delivery Project — has been working on outlining an ontology for the area of “Health IT”. the category is broad, so there are a large number of possible sub-categories, and increasingly so as federal money here in the US is put behind Health IT initiatives. head over to his blog and weigh in!

my boss’ boss is none other than Paul Farmer, who recently wrote a great piece on Obama’s health care plans. he’s clearly in the pro-Obama camp (and makes no bones about it), but i think he makes some points worthy of consideration/deliberation no matter which candidate you voted for. for more facts backing up his statements about the broken US healthcare system, see my post from Wednesday.

Can Obama Solve America’s Health Care Crisis?

we don’t have cable, so i don’t watch a lot of live TV these days (having 7 stations tends to limit your choices), but in a burst of random channel-surfing, i came across a show on PBS about health care. the program was taking a look at the health care systems of other capitalist democracies, evaluating what they are doing differently than we are here in the US. a few things stood out to me, including the level of overhead/waste in the US healthcare system compared to the other nations evaluated. i also liked a statement made by a right-wing senior member of Switzerland’s government, who said that while he doesn’t like big government, he can’t believe the US position on health: we say that education and legal counsel are basic rights of all citizens, but health is not?

regardless of your stance on health care policies in the US, the following show is definitely worth a watch (you can watch online):

Frontline: “Sick Around the World”

we have had the site up since late June, but with Jim Kim’s announcement, it’s official — GHDonline is here. as usual, there is much more on the horizon — new features, etc — but it’s a big accomplishment to get the site up in time for the IAS conference in Mexico City.

read Jim’s announcement about GHDonline
the GHDonline site

i realize that i haven’t posted anything about my new job, but the organization i work for is very closely tied to Partners in Health. this past weekend, 60 Minutes did a segment on the man behind PiH, Paul Farmer: