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Re: [his-pt] Dr. Scot Silverstein is the new director of the Drexel's Institu...

Thanks.  I look forward to expanding my writing about sociotechnologic
issues in healthcare IT.  An international perspective on these issues will
be essential if change is to happen.
 
Ironically, my appointment back in academia comes at about the same
time that the non-clinical, non-scientist Merck VP of computing who laid me
off and closed one of the science libraries I ran has resigned, as well as the
embattled CEO who resigned as well yesterday ( http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D89T95900.htm ).
 
Scot

I am
pleased to announce that Scot Silverstein, M.D., a member of this
[his-pt]
mailing list, has been appointed Assistant Professor of
Healthcare
Informatics and Information Technology and Director of the
Institute for
Healthcare Informatics at the Drexel University,
Philadelphia,
USA.

Dr. Silverstein was director of the Published Information
Resources &
The Merck Index at the Merck Research
Laboratories.

More
on:
http://www.cis.drexel.edu/press/article.asp?articleid=35

Congratulations
Scot,

J. Antas

 

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Fri, 2005-05-06 15:05 — scotsilv

Re: [his-pt] Dr. Scot Silverstein is the new director of the Dre

In a message dated 5/6/2005 10:44:20 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
wwilson@umich.edu writes:

I am
interested in whether you will be able to comment on the basic
business
model for large pharmaceuticals and whether or not Merck had
the 'wrong
model',  or perhaps Merck's management did everything right,
but the
scene is changing much like Harvard's Christensen implies in the

'Innovators Dilemma'?

While I cannot talk about details, what I can say is that I believe the
model of "big pharma" is still viable, but leadership must be by domain experts,
not non-scientist, non-medical MBA's and bureaucrats.  When the business
rules the science, and not the other way around, creativity suffers.  We
see this in a number of healthcare sectors.
 
In fact, the challenges of drug discovery make biomedical expertise among
leadership more critical than ever in the industry.  I
believe it's not that the "low hanging fruit" have already been picked,
it's that modern drug discovery can't be accomplished well if the critical
decisions are made by the "low-hanging fruit."
 
Merck did well when it followed the mantra of its founders:
 
We try to remember that medicine is for the patient. We try never to
forget that medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits. The profits
follow, and if we have remembered that, they have never failed to appear. The
better we have remembered it, the larger they have been.

as excerpted from the following talk by George W. Merck
At
the Medical College of Virginia at Richmond, December 1, 1950


-- SS