Info Buffet

Tasty tidbits I’ve been sampling from the “info buffet” 12/9/08 – 12/11/08:

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HR Capitalist blog has a good story illustrating how “the behavioral DNA that defines a company's culture” manifests itself in telling ways.

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The Freakonomics blog. Introduces us the concept of a “buycott.” Unlike the negatively-focused boycott (where you choose not to patronize a business whose practices you don’t agree with), the “boycott” is a more affirmative measure: You promise to patronize a business if it implements certain practices you’d like to see in place. According to the Freakonomics gang,, “buycotts” have potentially more economic leverage than boycotts.

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Now that we have a recession, there's never been a better time for defining health as human capital. That’s the message of the latest entry in the Health as Human Capital Foundation’s research blog. Wendy Lynch and Hank Gardner have a refreshingly different view of the value of good health. For a more detailed description of their “health as human capital paradigm,” go here. The key point for me is that health is one of the three key assets (along with skills and motivation) that people bring with them to their jobs.

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And speaking of health and jobs, here’s a recent WSJ op-ed by Dr Ezekiel Emanuel (he was co-author of the WaPo piece on the myths of healthcare that recently caught my attention) and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) arguing in favor of severing the link between employment and health insurance. One way or another, I think, the employment/health insurance link will be severed over the next several years—if not because of developments “on the left” (i.e., a national single-payer program), then because of developments “on the right” (i.e., a move to portable, defined-contribution type health accounts)…. For some more commentary on the Emanuel-Wyden op-ed, as well as socialized versus market-based approaches to health insurance, there’s this post by Matthew Holt in The Health Care Blog.

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I find myself reading a lot of materials about “market-based” approaches to health. Here’s one of them, courtesy of the WSJ Health Blog. Evidently, a study in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that if we paid people to lose weight, we could curb the obesity epidemic.

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Jane Sarasohn-Kahn is a healthcare economist whose work I’ve been following for the last half-year. I think she’s outstanding. One of her latest contributions is an article on how the economic downturn has been affecting people’s health behaviors. Bad economy leads to poor health behaviors. Jane combines insights from National Center for Health Statistics data about gender/age patterns in ambulatory visits to doctors with results of a recent AARP survey of how age 45+ Americans have altered healthcare behaviors due to the economic downturn and concludes that women's health outcomes in particular could decline in concert with the economy. Read the whole thing.

Jane also has another post about a recent National Research Corporation survey of “online health functions” that American households have been engaged in over the last year. The bottom line is that more and more people are doing a broader variety of health-related tasks online. In her “Hot Points” assessment, Jane sees evidence of what she calls the “Craigslistification” of health searching.

And be sure to check out Jane’s assessment of the NIH’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine’s latest report on use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in the United States. "Economics plays a role in the adoption of CAM. In both 2002 and 2007, when people delayed conventional health care due to cost, the use of CAM increased." Nutritional supplements (fish oil, glucosamine, and the like) were the most commonly used therapies; and musculoskeletal disorders (back issues, neck issues, joint disorders, etc) were the most common reason for using CAM.

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I spent yesterday morning at a decidedly non-CAM facility—a local gastroenterology center (I was waiting to pick someone up after a diagnostic procedure). While I was in the waiting room, I read the latest issue of Business Week, which had this highly informative article about how patients are using Web-based social networking to take charge of their own care. We’re going to be hearing a lot more about “Health 2.0” (especially if the “management gurus” get behind it, as this item indicates). And check out the end of the Business Week article—Jane’s everywhere these days!

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One my way home from the gastroenterology center yesterday, I stopped at Dunkin Donuts to pick up a late breakfast. Fast food places like DD are notorious for high employee turnover. Which leads me to the next item: An article on the kinds of “hard-knock turnover situations where [any HR professional] would have a hard time getting annualized turnover under 100 percent.” How many businesses in these five categories would appear on this list? Not many, I suppose.

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And finally: The WSJ Juggle blog asks readers how their families are using texting. I’m sorry, I just don’t get what the advantage of texting is (yeah, I know-- I’m old. I don’t get it.)