David W. Johnson
About the Author
David W. Johnson
Latest Work
David Johnson: RFK Jr. will focus on ‘Getting America healthy again’ — and maybe it’s possible
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has suspended his campaign for the U.S. presidency and endorsed Republican candidate Donald Trump in exchange for broad inter-departmental authority to address the chronic disease epidemic plaguing the nation.
David Johnson: 10 forces are combining to disrupt healthcare’s status quo
The U.S. healthcare system operates in much the same way it has for the past 100 years: always hospital-centric, physician-centric, disease-centric, treatment-centric and transaction-centric. Providers receive payment for the specific treatments they deliver. There is limited care coordination, little emphasis on prevention, inadequate provision of mental health services and woeful chronic disease management. The result…
David Johnson: Walmart Health’s demise is emblematic of the nation’s primary care conundrum
Walmart’s announcement on April 30 that it was pulling the plug on Walmart Health stunned the healthcare ecosystem.a Few saw it coming. Launched amid much fanfare in 2019, Walmart Health has operated 51 health centers in five states, with a robust virtual care platform. Walmart’s news release noted that “the challenging reimbursement environment and escalating…
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.…