David W. Johnson
About the Author
David W. Johnson
Latest Work
David Johnson: GoFundMe helps some pay for healthcare, but it’s an awful solution
During the chaotic runup to the 2020 elections, President Trump nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett to fill Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s vacated seat. On Sept. 26, 2020, Trump held a White House Rose Garden ceremony to celebrate Coney Barrett’s nomination. It became a COVID-19 super-spreader event. At least 11 of the attendees contracted COVID. They included…
David Johnson: Fortune telling healthcare’s dismal future
January 1970 was a long time ago. Richard Nixon celebrated the first anniversary of his presidency. The Vietnam War was raging. The Paris Peace Accords, the Arab oil embargo, stagflation, wage and price controls, devaluation of the dollar, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Nixon’s historic trip…
David Johnson: Right-sizing physician training? The case for surgical mechanics
American healthcare reputedly confronts a monumental physician shortage. A highly publicized 2021 report by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) forecasts that shortage to be as high as 180,000 physicians by 2034.a That’s out of a total population of roughly one million physicians. A breathless commentary on the AAMC report by the American Medical Association…
David Johnson: The perils and possibilities of healthcare apps
In March of 2022, I coauthored a commentary titled “Healthcare’s final frontier: Engaging customers.” It contained this tongue-in-cheek Star Trek reference: “[H]ealthcare is now boldly going where most industries have gone before — into full-fledged consumer engagement.” Wanting full-fledged consumer engagement and making it happen are not synonymous. In the best of healthcare times, providers…
Dave Johnson: Diagnostic determinism — How precision diagnostics will reinvent medicine
In the movie “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home,” the spaceship Enterprise travels back in time to San Francisco in the mid-1980s. Its mission is to transport humpback whales into the 23rd century to redirect a space probe heading to destroy earth. It’s a complicated story. While trying to escape police custody, crewmember Pavel Chekov…
David Johnson: Academic medicine, where privilege compounds dysfunction
Academic medicine combines healthcare with higher education, the two U.S. economic sectors that have exhibited outsized cost growth over the past 50 years. The result is a stunning disconnection between academic medical center (AMC) business practices and the supply-demand dynamics reshaping healthcare delivery. Market, technological and regulatory forces are pushing the healthcare industry to deliver…
AI and the rise of human-machine collaboration in healthcare
Commentators, researchers and academics can’t stop finding applications for ChatGPT.a Two of its recent claims to fame include passing all three medical licensing exams and the final exam for a core MBA class at Wharton.b ChatGPT, short for Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, is a form of conversational artificial intelligence (AI). The concept is not new.…
David Johnson: Rewiring healthcare’s smartest professionals (Hint: It’s not physicians)
I won’t keep you in suspense. Healthcare’s smartest professionals are the tens of thousands of individuals who populate its revenue cycle operations. Revenue cycle professionals determine how much payers fork out and how much providers receive for healthcare treatments. They constitute the beating heart of the nation’s transactional healthcare system. Their ingenuity knows no bounds.…
David Johnson: Cracks in the foundation (Part 4): Overcoming a brittle business model
U.S. health systems’ rely on centralized, high-cost platforms (e.g., hospitals) to deliver routine care in an approach focused on optimizing revenues under fee-for-service payment. Yet this approach is inefficient and asset-heavy. To build less brittle, more consumer-centric delivery platforms, health systems must decant procedures to more convenient, lower-cost locations as they pursue full-risk contracting.
David Johnson: Cracks in the Foundation (Part 3): Overcoming healthcare’s services-need mismatch
Clinical care only accounts for 20% of health outcomes, yet this area is where America disproportionately invests its healthcare resources. To overcome U.S. healthcare’s services-need mismatch, there should be a greater investment in healthy multipliers that help to address the social and economic factors, health behaviors and the physical environment that drive the remaining 80% of health outcomes.