Matt Herper has just posted a very insightful article out -- on the above giant in cardiology -- do go read it all, at Forbes:
. . . .Yale cardiologist Harlan Krumholz, age 52, has spent two decades shining a light into this broken system. When he started, the kind of "outcomes" research he does was deeply unfashionable. Doctors figured that it would merely confirm the obvious fact that some doctors and hospitals are better than others.
Krumholz proved the skeptics wrong. By figuring out what to measure and how, he showed that even top hospitals were systematically underperforming, largely because no one was tracking the results. . . .
Krumholz showed that only 33% of patients were getting angioplasty in that time frame. He also showed that the delays increased the death rate. . . .
[D]octors trust him because he speaks his mind and puts patients first. . . . When Merck's anticholesterol drug Zetia failed to clear artery plaque in a key study in 2008, Krumholz addressed a big conference of cardiologists and bluntly told them to use better-proven drugs. Merck lost $22 billion in market cap that afternoon. . . .
As I say, do go read it all.
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