Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Who let this through at HBR?

Harvard Business Review online often has interesting and thoughtful pieces, but this one is so self-serving as to make me gag--and wonder about the editorial policies that allowed its publication. 

The title seems innoucous enough--"Teaching Hospitals are the Best Place to Test Health Innovation." But this is no rigorous study or presentation of the article's premise.  No, when you read the thing, you discover that is a paean for the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City and for a product developed by a doctor at the hospital, in which the hospital presumably has a financial interest.

It really would be interesting to analyze and test the proposition about teaching hopsitals versus non-teaching hospitals to see where clinical innovation is most likely to spread.  But this article makes no contribution along those lines.

As a piece of earned media, it is a public relations triumph.  I just never expected HBR to be taken in so easily.

1 comment:

Norma Sandrock said...

From Facebook:

So it's a barcode reader that saves the circulator from entering the serial number? And we are supposed to believe they were opening and wasting $1.5 million/year of the wrong implants because the labels are small and hard to read? Hmmm...looks like they have a solution searching for a problem.