PA in the September Fast Company

The latest issue of Fast Company arrived yesterday in the mail. This morning's agenda included a trip to the dentist so I had a chance to read it in the waiting room. A few Pennsylvania items and something else just of interest. The fastcompany.com website hasn't been updated yet to include the Sept. issue but when it is one or more of these articles should be online, or you could buy it on the newstand.

In "Fast-Food Medicine," by Ellen McGirt, on medical clinics in retail stores we find this:

Not all doctors and health systems are resistant to the idea of these businesses. Geisinger, a regional health system in Pennsylvania, has opened four clinics in the past year inside Weis Markets, a local grocery chain. Two more are under way. "If we didn't do it, someone else would in our own back yard," says Dean Lin, VP at Geisinger and CEO of its CareWorks clinic business. Worries that it would be competing with its own physician practices have proved unfounded. "About 30% of our customers have no physician," he adds. It's hard to argue with the math. "For strep throat, a doctor's visit would average $329, urgent care $109, and were $55," he says.

As a personal aside when I was in college, in a state far far away, there were stand alone clinics like this, informally called "Doc in the box." If you cut yourself badly enough to need stitches but didn't nick an artery, you would go to one of these instead of an emergency room. Step on a nail and need a tetanus shot, or fall out of a tree and break an arm, you went to the clinic instead of the ER. It was cheaper and faster. Some had x-ray machines on the premises. You still had a doctor for check-ups and important stuff, and usually followed up your clinic visit with a trip to your primary care physician, still used the ER for dire emergencies, but for the things in the middle, where it was timely but not life threatening and easily fixed, you went to the doc in the box.

Philly takes center stage in "Microsoft's Class Action," by Elizabeth Svoboda. The entire article is about the partnership between Microsoft (and to a lesser degree, other companies) and the Philadelphia school system. Mary Cullinane of Microsoft works closely with Philly's School of the Future. The company didn't just throw money at the school but comes in to talk about the curriculum.

Cullinane's position is that more interactive, integrative classroom environment helps kids retain knowledge better and engage more actively in learning -- and an intimidating array of research backs her up. In addition to the Bertelsmann study, she cites the Jasper-Woodbury experiments conducted at Vanderbilt University in the 1990's, in which researchers challenged teenage students with real-world problems that demand cross-disciplinary thinking. (In one scenario, a hiker finds an injured eagle in a remote mountain pass that can be reached only by personal aircraft; students work in teams to figure out the best way to retrieve it, given a fixed wind speed and fuel capacity.

A few other interesting items include an article on a 17 year old girl who has developed an Internet company and is now being offered a million or two for it, an article on the former president of the Sierra Club who now works for Wal-Mart on sustainability issues, and a cautionary tale on New Orleans' film industry.

Good stuff.