This blog is meant to be an outlet for health care professionals and employees of WakeMed to discuss important issues.  We are pleased to welcome commentary from our first guest blogger, Laura Aiken, community health specialist with WakeMed and director of Advocates for Health in Action (AHA).  Learn more about AHA by visiting their Web [...]

NAMI Wake County (National Alliance on Mental Illness) has expressed concern over Wake County’s lack of hospital beds for psychiatric patients, and has called on WakeMed to fill this void. Below is my response to Ann Akland, Co-President of NAMI Wake County.
Dear Mrs. Akland:
As you know, over the past three years Wake County Government,  Holly [...]

With more than a dozen different proposals for health care reform, the debate gets confusing. Senators and representatives have submitted their own bills, along with the Senate Health Committee, the Senate Finance Committee, the House Tri-Committee, the President… where does each bill stand on the issues?
This Web site by the Kaiser Family Foundation allows you [...]

A reader recently posted a thought-provoking comment – one that I believe many of you may have considered.  The question: “Is healthcare a fundamental right??
The answer, I think, is that we must view basic health care in a similar way that we see defense and public safety in this country. We have collectively decided as [...]

If you’re looking for a sure sign of the need for health care reform, you should take a visit to an Emergency Department.  It has become the de facto “front door” to our health care system for millions of patients who turn to hospitals to provide routine medical care not because they want to, but [...]

I had the chance to attend President Obama’s town hall meeting on health care reform in Raleigh this afternoon.  It was a delight to have the President here in our backyard.  WakeMed’s Senior Vice President Judy O’Neal was even fortunate enough to sit on stage and get a “President’s eye” view of the crowd.  Afterwards, [...]

In health care we have an acronym for everything. I’m sure you have heard HIPAA, EMR, ICU, etc.  I’ve created an acronym of my own – ACQ or Access, Cost and Quality.  In my mind, these are the three fundamental issues that have to be addressed when working to reform today’s national health care system [...]

This post from Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein is a must read.
Klein cuts through the sometimes overly-dramatic rhetoric that we hear on TV about health care reform and reveals a cogent analysis about where things stand. And where things stand, he argues, is entirely predictable. But he also points out that health care reform is [...]

To start the conversation, I encourage everyone to take a look at the article published in today’s News & Observer highlighting where several organizations around the Triangle stand on health care reform, including WakeMed.
This, and many other relevant articles, will be posted and stored in the News Archive section of this blog.

I’ve been running a hospital for the better part of three decades and my friends and neighbors often seek me out when they have questions about health care. Lately, those questions have been coming a lot more frequently and they are all about health care reform. The short answer to the most frequently asked [...]