I’ve always held the belief that we should focus on people first.  Whether in our professional or personal life, most everything we do involves people – our actions, emotions, etc. are tied to people.  Related to these beliefs, a  quote from Dick Clark (no, not the Band Stand one, the Merck CEO) resonated with me today as I was reading his comments on Merck’s recent acquisition of Schering-Plough (from the recent JP Morgan Healthcare Conference):

And certainly I use a statement, perhaps too much, that culture eats strategy for lunch, and so if you don’t get the culture right, it really doesn’t matter what the strategy is.

I couldn’t agree more.

No, this isn’t about the health of your car, it is related to my last post – Continuous monitoring of your health. I guess it does relate to the health of cars a bit in that the idea is a bit like OnStar, save a little more complex of course.  After all, a car is quite simple compared to the human body.  “auto-health” will be the next “big thing” in the healthcare space.  It’s in the infancy stage, but will rapidly progress, especially if the feds keep driving HIT and if the X-Prize people keep coming up w/ fun contests.  The idea is a device companies using wireless-enabled devices to monitor your health, auto-upload it, and then have machines analyze it letting you know if the sense anything irregular compared to others your age, the massive databases (Ingenix-like) they’ll have at their disposal, etc.  Imagine: “Want to have the internet keep you healthy?  There’s an app for that.”  “Want to be notified of a new flu strain in your area?  There’s an app for that?”

Kudos to the gov/Obama for actually creating a site that helps us stay in the loop/educated with what is going on in this country and up “on the hill”.  This evening I spent some time reviewing the site – Recovery.gov.

It looks like the site was just released so only limited information is available right now, but the FAQ suggests the site will be posting much more information on the ARRA (The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) spend in the near-future.