Congratulations to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation which this week celebrated the 25th anniversary of one of its most successful initiatives, the Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program (AMFDP).

Harold Amos, PhD

AMFDP is designed to increase “the number of individuals from historically underrepresented groups who achieve senior-level rank in academic medicine.”  It is based at Indiana University. Each year, AMFDP awards up to twelve 4-year postdoctoral research grants to physicians from disadvantaged backgrounds who want to establish careers in academic medicine.  Scholars receive an annual stipend of $75,000, and another $30,000 goes to their medical school.

AMFDP has graduated 181 scholars to date. More than 80% remain in academic medicine, including 35 professors. Recently, Harold Amos Scholar Dr. Lisa Cooper received a Genius Award from the MacArthur Foundation for her efforts to improve communication between patients and physicians.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has invested more than $110 million in the project since its inception in 1983. The Foundation renamed the project 5 years ago to honor Harold Amos, PhD, the first African American chair of a department at Harvard Medical School and a founding advisor for the program.

More information on AMFDP can be found here.

Few companies are benefiting from the financial crisis, but business networking sites such as LinkedIn and Xing are doing just that. These sites have grown rapidly as economic conditions have soured. In the last several weeks, an unprecedented number of LinkedIn members updated their profiles, preparing themselves perhaps for the possibility they may lose their jobs.

LinkedIn and Xing provide platforms allowing business professionals to get their names out there, keep track of peers and industry leaders, establish new contacts and form groups with common interests.

LinkedIn is a privately held, Silicon Valley based company that has 29 million members. It was started in 2002 and is now valued at $1 billion on revenues of approximately $100m. LinkedIn’s revenues derive from members as well as headhunters and companies that pay to troll their databases.

Xing is a German company that has 6 million members. It was founded in 2003 and went public in 2006. It had revenues $24m in the first half of this year. Xing’s revenues derive primarily from subscription fees, because the site emphasizes networking rather than job search.

Their business concept now proven, these two companies now must fend off competition. Facebook has the capacity to play in this space, for example. Even the venerable Wall Street Journal and New York Times have nascent professional networking features on their sites.

Twenty years ago, we were aware that US medical school graduates tended to enter disciplines having the highest earning potential. Since then, income disparity between specialists and primary care physicians has widened, and medical student debt has ballooned to an astounding median of $140,000 per graduating senior.

So there is no reason to be surprised by the results of a recently published survey of graduating students from 11 US medical schools. Only 2% of respondents to this survey indicated that they planned to work in primary care internal medicine. That’s down from 9% in 1990. This year, 2,600 fewer US doctors enrolled in primary care training programs than did so just 6 years ago. 

The survey revealed that low income is just one reason why US medical students steer clear of general internal medicine. They are turned off by heavy workloads, continuous hassling with insurance companies and inadequate ancillary support as well.

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As China’s economy morphs from state-controlled to consumer-driven and its companies play increasingly important roles in international commerce, people naturally start to wonder about executive compensation in these companies.

An article in this week’s The Economist summarizes the results of a new study of the matter by investigators at the University of Hong Kong and Penn State. It provides enticing, though narrow insights.

The investigators studied “red chip” companies-those which operate in China, are incorporated abroad and are listed in Hong Kong. Until recently this was the traditional method by which state-controlled companies related to capital markets, and even today red chips comprise more than half the total market cap of all Chinese firms.

In these companies, executive salaries were found to average $180,000-low by international standards. Nearly every company offered stock options (valued at $140,000), but surprisingly, more than half the Chinese executives never exercised these options.

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Blogpulse has identified 78 million blogs out there. It estimates that 100,000 new blogs will be started today. There are thousands of excellent blogs covering health care. So why bother?