The New Living Heart

Abstract

The end of this millennium will be remembered for many things. Chief among them will be that this was the era of the consumer, whose needs helped to ignite and continue to fuel an explosive information age. Slogans such as “An educated consumer is our best customer” epitomize the paradigm shift from gullery to tutelage in contemporary marketing, although some may view the latter as simply a more sophisticated form of mendacity. In part, the new strategy is a response to advances in communication technology coupled with the compulsions of discerning consumers. Parallel transitions have occurred in medicine, now known as the healthcare industry, in which the term client has become synonymous with patient, the concept of population served has been replaced by the number of lives covered, and in which a practice may not survive without an elaborate Web site or home page. The patient is now the commodity. The buyer’s market in medicine has stimulated efforts at outreach and information transfer at unprecedented levels. Medical consumers have become efficient search engines. They can access the latest medical information on-line, they are intrigued by watching live operations on the Nova channel, and they are able to read the results of research studies in the New York Times, often long before medical journals ever hit our “in” boxes. With …