For those of you keeping score, the price of a barrel of oil is down $2.55 as of 4:15 p.m. today, a little more than half of yesterday’s nearly $5-a-barrel hike that produced an almost instant 17-cent run-up at the pumps in Wichita.
UPDATE: No downward movement last night in the price of unleaded. And this morning, oil suddenly shot up $4 a barrel. What’s the moral? Time to fill up.
Cue the “price hike had nothing to do with the day’s trading” excuses in 3, 2, 1 …
So, if my math follows, a gallon of unleaded should be trading at around $3.56 tomorrow morning in Wichita, right?
Tune in tomorrow for further details.
Business Casual is feeling very empowered today.
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, who also blogs, said this week that blogging has the power to advance the debate on health care policy by allowing more interaction between members of the public and policymakers, according to the Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report.
He called blogging a “very powerful engine for public policy setting,” he said in Congressional Quarterly.
Leavitt said he writes about a range of topics, from his daily experiences to the decision-making process on various health care policies and issues such as Medicare, SCHIP and import safety, Kaiser reports.
Here is a link to Leavitt’s blog.
Corporate Fitness & Wellness Today wonders if “wellness hospitals” are on the horizon.
A McKinsey Quarterly report says U.S. hospitals being “battered by the competition” are trying to be all things to all patients — and that’s no longer a viable strategy.
Key findings:
- One way hospitals can more effectively compete with smaller, more focused competitors is to organize themselves by service line, focusing on building world-class capabilities in just a few clinical areas.
- Hospitals that succeed with this strategy can reap tremendous fiscal benefits while enhancing their ability to serve their communities. But as three disguised case studies show, the successful implementation of a service-line strategy is no mean feat.
- Choosing the right service lines to emphasize requires a superior understanding of a hospital’s economics and competitive environment. Hospitals also need to overhaul the management of both strategic and nonstrategic service lines.