Ben White

Asides are a microblog of shared links and quick thoughts.
They're on the main page but also all collected here.
Think of it like a Twitter feed without the awfulness.

It is because doctors are understood to place patients’ interests above commercial ones that they have long enjoyed professional autonomy and public trust. The history of medicine is too littered with incompetence and immorality to believe that doctors have always been worthy of this status. Still, something profound is lost when we submit to the jaundiced view that medicine is a business like any other. There is value in striving for something higher.

From Dhruv Khullar’s “The Gilded Age of Medicine Is Here” in the New Yorker.

// 12.17.24

I started Independent Radiology–a job board exclusively dedicated to featuring physician-owned private practices–on August 14. This past weekend we hit a major milestone I wouldn’t have predicted: 100 groups advertising their openings. The level of group and user engagement has been great to see.

// 12.09.24

If you’re a trainee going to RSNA this year, I’ll be giving a talk about careers in radiology during Session M3-RCP20: Navigating the Job Market at 9:30am on Monday. Come say hi!

// 12.01.24

My internet friends over at Medality are having a big Black Friday sale a holiday gift sale Dec 17-22 for a free self-paced Fellowship with any Premium Membership or Fellowship. Solid use of CME funds before the end of the year, and an easy way to support this site.

// 11.29.24

They used to say academics was less production/pay and private practice was high stress/high comp. The gap has narrowed because the academy is demanding much more, lots of rads are just nonacademic employees of the university behemoth working a generic job, and the labor shortage means hospitals/universities need to pay more to compete in the job market.

Perhaps counterintuitively, strong private practice in the face of the labor shortage is one of the factors driving up academic compensation.

// 11.17.24

Add this to the list of things that I should have had ready for launch day back in August: the Independent Radiology Newsletter. Sign up now to receive monthly job updates from the world of private practice radiology.

// 11.12.24

It’s an incredible privilege to work at a place and live in a country that is willing to set aside money to answer these existential questions. I heard a phrase the other week, existential humility, and I really liked that. We’re this complex life form that has evolved over billions of years to the point where we can ask these questions — and yet we’re perhaps not the only ones in the universe. And if we could know that for certain, that would be humbling in the most wonderful possible way.

– Astronomer Vanessa Bailey in Dave Eggers’ “The Searchers,” a profile on NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.

// 10.18.24

Another paper suggesting that clinicians prefer some structure (but not too much structure) in radiology reports. There are always edge cases where structured reporting becomes cumbersome–and overly parsed reports are also inefficient/unreadable–but there’s no denying it’s so much easier for me to scan a prior report when it’s not narrative free text.

// 10.06.24

A reader asked if anyone had successfully started a new radiology private practice recently, particularly one that involved financing, opening up new imaging centers, and fresh payor contracts. There is a vacuum in some areas, especially with the PE-exacerbated instability, and therefore a clear opportunity to those who can muster the manpower (no easy feat).

As a follow-up, I thought I’d ask (on their behalf): is anyone who has willing to mentor other upstarts?

// 09.30.24

The month of August has been almost exclusively related to the usual activities of daily living and the new/growing job board I’ve started dedicated to true independent physician-owned radiology private practices, which now has 45 groups. I know a service like Independent Radiology probably has more impact than my usual sporadic writing, but I’m personally looking forward to getting back to my usual idiosyncrasies in September.

// 08.29.24

From “Writer Math” by Elissa Bassist in McSweeney’s:

If you think a piece is 100 percent done, it’s actually 45 percent done. To get it to 100 percent done, you can’t.

// 06.12.24
  1. Yes, I’ve started the process of creating a small dedicated job board just for independent radiologist-owned private practices. With all the corporate noise out there, I’m hoping we can connect radiologists looking for the real deal with those groups who are doing it. Still a ways to go, but feel free to reach out to me at ben@benwhite.com if your group is interested, and I’ll get back to you when things are ready.
  2. Separately, yes, for the first time in this site’s 15-year history, I’ve decided to run a real ad. Not a banner ad (and no images), but starting on June 1st, there will be a single monthly post featuring a limited number of true radiology private practices. I’ve temporarily changed this policy because of the radiologist shortage combined with the current less-than-stellar recruitment/marketing environment. I hope folks find it unobtrusive and even helpful; I’ll reevaluate in a year.
// 05.20.24

The tale of case review at Cigna in ProPublica:

“Deny, deny, deny. That’s how you hit your numbers,” said Day, who worked for Cigna until the late spring of 2022. “If you take a breath or think about any of these cases, you’re going to fall behind.”

[…]

The early 2022 dashboards listed a handle time of four minutes for a prior authorization. The bulk of drug requests were to be decided in two to five minutes. Hospital discharge decisions were supposed to take four and a half minutes.

[…]

As ProPublica and The Capitol Forum reported last year, Cigna built a computer program that allowed its medical directors to deny certain claims in bulk. The insurer’s doctors spent an average of just 1.2 seconds on each of those cases.

// 04.30.24

If you have HBO Max, standup comic Alex Edelman’s one-man show was excellent. The official description of its main narrative thread: “In the wake of a string of anti–Semitic threats pointed in his direction online, standup comic Alex Edelman decides to go straight to the source; specifically, Queens, where he covertly attends a meeting of White Nationalists.” Here’s the trailer.

// 04.21.24

I got an underdesk elliptical a couple of weeks ago…I think maybe it’s awesome and wish I had gotten one a long time ago. I’m honestly a little surprised I can pedal while thinking.

I tried a few, and this is the one I landed on: very stable, pretty cheap, reasonably quiet.

// 03.11.24

Fresh off the press in AJNR:

Lower [neuroradiology] shift volumes yielded significantly lower error rates. The lowest error rates were observed with shift volumes that were limited to 19–26 [CT/MRI] studies. Error rates at shift volumes between 67–90 studies were 226% higher, compared with the error rate at shift volumes of ≤ 19 studies.

I wonder, are there any places in the world routinely reading ~20 cases per shift?

// 01.29.24

C.S. Lewis (of Narnia fame) on peer learning:

It often happens that two schoolboys can solve difficulties in their work for one another better than the master can. The fellow-pupil can help more than the master because he knows less. The difficulty we want him to explain is one he has recently met. The expert met it so long ago he has forgotten.

I’ve always been a big proponent of peer teaching and peer mentoring in medicine. I also often wonder if I’m getting worse at teaching the basics as I get older.

// 01.15.24

From “How to Do Great Work” by Paul Graham:

Schools also give you a misleading impression of what work is like. In school they tell you what the problems are, and they’re almost always soluble using no more than you’ve been taught so far. In real life you have to figure out what the problems are, and you often don’t know if they’re soluble at all.

Schools sometimes also give students the misleading impression that learning is not fun for its own sake and that writing should be boring.

// 01.04.24

From “The Bitter Lesson” by Rich Sutton:

In speech recognition, there was an early competition, sponsored by DARPA, in the 1970s. Entrants included a host of special methods that took advantage of human knowledge—knowledge of words, of phonemes, of the human vocal tract, etc. On the other side were newer methods that were more statistical in nature and did much more computation, based on hidden Markov models (HMMs). Again, the statistical methods won out over the human-knowledge-based methods. This led to a major change in all of natural language processing, gradually over decades, where statistics and computation came to dominate the field. The recent rise of deep learning in speech recognition is the most recent step in this consistent direction. Deep learning methods rely even less on human knowledge, and use even more computation, together with learning on huge training sets, to produce dramatically better speech recognition systems. As in the games, researchers always tried to make systems that worked the way the researchers thought their own minds worked—they tried to put that knowledge in their systems—but it proved ultimately counterproductive, and a colossal waste of researcher’s time, when, through Moore’s law, massive computation became available and a means was found to put it to good use.

[…]

We want AI agents that can discover like we can, not which contain what we have discovered. Building in our discoveries only makes it harder to see how the discovering process can be done.

// 01.03.24

In addition to being New Year’s, this site turned 15 years old (!) today. It contains hundreds of posts, over a half million words, and oodles of my time.

Thanks for reading!

// 01.01.24

My crystal ball is as cloudy as ever.

Earlier this month I wrote about Radiology Partners loaning a group money to help shore up radiologist compensation. That happened, but I was also wrong in my estimation of the likelihood of repayment: it turns out RP may be getting some of that money back after all.

The ultimate outcome is still up in the air, but I’ve addended my previous post with an update.

// 12.29.23

From “Serious Medical Errors Rose After Private Equity Firms Bought Hospitals,” reported by the NYT:

The study, published in JAMA on Tuesday, found that, in the three years after a private equity fund bought a hospital, adverse events including surgical infections and bed sores rose by 25 percent among Medicare patients when compared with similar hospitals that were not bought by such investors. The researchers reported a nearly 38 percent increase in central line infections, a dangerous kind of infection that medical authorities say should never happen, and a 27 percent increase in falls by patients while staying in the hospital.

“We were not surprised there was a signal,” said Dr. Sneha Kannan, a health care researcher and physician at the division of pulmonary and critical care at Massachusetts General Hospital, who was the paper’s lead author. “I will say we were surprised at how strong it was.”

// 12.26.23

People like to operate under the belief that services like anesthesia, radiology, and pathology are totally interchangeable commodities. We do the work but don’t generate it, and patients generally don’t get to pick.

But in the real world, labor isn’t as cog-like as you might think, and culture matters (yes, even in our dysfunctional healthcare system).

Here, enjoy this story of a failed private equity anesthesia takeover.

// 12.12.23

The UnitedHealthcare vs Radiology Partners lawsuit went to arbitration instead of a jury trial last month. Last week, the arbitration panel ruled in favor of RP and its practice Singleton Associates, awarding them $153.5 million.

United, for its part, says it’s not done, and that there are still unaddressed counterclaims. From that Radiology Business article: “We do not agree that Singleton will recover an award from UnitedHealthcare,” the Minnetonka, Minnesota, company said.

// 10.24.23

Two great quick radiology podcasts, well worth your time for a better understanding of radiology in 2023:

First, the state of the radiology residency match and how things look for medical students as well as the radiology workforce, courtesy of Dr. Francis Deng (@francisdeng). I agree with everything he said, and he said it better than I would have. Listen here.

Second, episode 2 of the Texas Radiological Society’s “How Radiologists Get Paid” Podcast: a great discussion of the state of payment policy between Dr. Kurt Schoppe, policy wonk and my colleague across town, and Dr. Lauren Nicola, current Chair of the Reimbursement Committee at the ACR. If you want a better understanding of CMS reimbursement and what “quality” has meant recently in radiology, check it out.

// 09.28.23

From the short essay, “Energy Makes Time,” by Mandy Brown:

But there’s something else I want to suggest here, and it’s to stop thinking about time entirely. Or, at least, to stop thinking about time as something consistent. We all know that time can be stretchy or compressed—we’ve experienced hours that plodded along interminably and those that whisked by in a few breaths. We’ve had days in which we got so much done we surprised ourselves and days where we got into a staring contest with the to-do list and the to-do list didn’t blink. And we’ve also had days that left us puddled on the floor and days that left us pumped up, practically leaping out of our chairs. What differentiates these experiences isn’t the number of hours in the day but the energy we get from the work. Energy makes time.

The what is sometimes even more important than the how much.

// 09.04.23

From the free ebook A Manifesto for Applying Behavioral Science from the UK’s Behavioural Insights Team:

The other concern is that [behavorial science] theories can make specific predictions, but they are disconnected from each other – and from a deeper, general framework that can provide broader explanations (like evolutionary theory, for example). The main way this issue affects behavioral science is through heuristics and biases. Examples of individual biases are accessible, popular, and how many people first encounter behavioral science. These ideas are incredibly useful, but have often been presented as lists of standalone curiosities, in a way that is incoherent, reductive, and deadening. They can create overconfident thinking that targeting a specific bias (in isolation) will achieve a certain outcome.

Cognitive biases and mental models make for great blog posts but are really hard to put into practice as an individual or effectively guide policy as an organization.

For further reading, try Nudge (the new/final edition was just released in 2021).

// 08.28.23

In a similar vein to our recent discussion of radiology practice and game theory, this is from Andrew K. Moriarity’s new article in JACR, “Pirate Practice”:

Employed sailors could count on the guarantee of agreed-upon pay in return for work performed. However, each pirate must be primarily motivated to ensure group success by their own self-interest because each endeavor lasted only as long cooperation maximized profits over expenses.

[…]

In considering the cooperation needed among individuals for a successful voyage to keep moving forward, perhaps Jack Sparrow was right to conclude that “not all treasure is silver and gold, mate.”

// 08.24.23

Humans–with some incredible diligence and lots of practice–can do such fascinating things.

Pretty unreal.

// 08.23.23

Hold in the back of your mind the notion that someday you’re gonna write a book. You don’t have to write it this year. Meanwhile, writing begets writing. Just get into some kind of situation where you are writing, and if it’s some various thing you’re publishing online, it’s still grist to the mill.

Legendary nonfiction writer John McPhee in an interview with GQ at the tender age of 92. For further reading, see Draft No. 4.

// 08.22.23

From Tanner Greer’s The Scholar’s Stage:

The professionalization of intellectual pursuit is another problem. Melville would never have written Moby Dick if he had spent years enrolled in an MFA program instead of spending years at sea. Men and women who in past ages would have observed humanity up close (or at least who would have been forced through a broad but rigorous education in classics) instead cloister themselves in ivory towers. Their intellectual energy is channeled into ever more specialized academic fields and cautiously climbing a bureaucratic and over-managed academic ladder. Could that social scene ever produce a great work?

// 08.21.23

Great reporting by Cezary Podkul in ProPublica (and amazing perseverance by Dr. Shteynshlyuger):

A powerful lobbyist convinced a federal agency that doctors can be forced to pay fees on money that health insurers owe them. Big companies rake in profits while doctors are saddled with yet another cost in a burdensome health care system.

// 08.16.23

I’ll be giving the keynote at the FSU College of Medicine’s Business & Medicine Symposium in Tallahassee this Saturday. If you’re a student there, make sure to come say hi during the morning coffee or lunch after!

// 08.15.23

On my brief perusal, the eBook for Undergraduate Education in Radiology (developed by the European Society of Radiology) seems like a great and entirely free first radiology book for medical students and first-year residents. In particular, the sections I looked at included a great first pass of high-yield anatomy. Strongly recommended.

// 08.13.23

$39 billion of student loans were forgiven tax-free this month.

If you have any FFEL, Perkins, or Health Education Assistance Loan (HEAL) Program loans, please check out the IDR Waiver FAQ. You have until the end of 2023 to do a Direct Consolidation to make those loans eligible for loan forgiveness programs and count previous payments without resetting the clock.

// 07.20.23
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