Author: Serkadis

Charlie Mamrak has joined Chicago-based private equity firm Linden LLC as an operating partner. He previously was CEO of PML Microbiologicals.

PRESS RELEASE

Linden LLC, a Chicago-based private equity firm that focuses on middle market leveraged buyout investments in the healthcare and life science sector, today announced that it has further enhanced its operating talent with the addition of Charlie Mamrak as an Operating Partner.

Mr. Mamrak brings over 20 years of life science and laboratory experience to Linden. Prior to joining Linden, Charlie was CEO of PML Microbiologicals, where he and his team grew revenues 90% in under three years. He then engineered a highly profitable divestiture for their private equity investors to a strategic buyer. Prior to PML, Charlie was CEO for a private equity backed contract packaging and manufacturing business focused on solid dose pharmaceuticals. Before his private equity experience, Charlie held several general management posts at Fisher Scientific, leading both the Acros Organics North American and Global Custom Chemistry businesses. Charlie also held senior positions with Sigma-Aldrich where he helped develop and launch their line of Discovery HPLC columns. Earlier in his career, Charlie worked in and managed several contract research laboratories including DuPont, CH2M Hill and Corning Laboratories. Charlie studied Biomedical Engineering at Pennsylvania State University and holds a Bachelors degree in Biology and Chemistry from Moravian College.

Mr. Mamrak augments Linden’s prestigious group of Operating Partners who collectively have over a century of healthcare experience. Together with Operating Partner Mr. Fran Lunger, former CEO of Millipore, Charlie will work closely with Linden’s investment team to research and identify new opportunities in life science as well as supporting portfolio companies. Linden anticipates that Charlie will serve as a Board Member and operating executive of at least one platform company.

About Linden LLC
Linden is a Chicago-based private equity firm focused exclusively on leveraged buyouts in the healthcare and life science industries. Linden’s strategy is based upon three elements: i) healthcare and life science industry specialization, ii) integrated private equity and operating expertise, and iii) strategic relationships with large corporations. Linden’s portfolio includes BarrierSafe Solutions International, Behavioral Centers of America, Corpak MedSystems, Drayer Physical Therapy Institute, Focused Health Solutions, Ranir, and Suture Express. For additional information, please visit www.lindenllc.com.

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By now, every health care reporter in the country should have at least heard of the Dartmouth Atlas, and those who haven’t should probably go to Wikipedia or the Atlas website itself before committing another word to the topic of health care reform. The Atlas’ notoriety among reporters and the general public is only recent, despite the fact that the researchers involved have been compiling their data for nearly 20 years. But their central message has been absorbed by health care policy wonks and many of the members of Congress who are involved in crafting health reform legislation: Our health care system delivers a huge amount of unnecessary care, maybe as much as 20 to 30 percent of every health care dollar.

Many researchers and providers agree with this assessment, and I’ve had individual physicians tell me that they know for a fact that patients are being put at risk in their hospitals by all the unnecessary care they receive. So why are a handful of administrators and doctors at some of the nation’s most prestigious academic medical centers trying to discredit Dartmouth’s findings? The answer, in a word, is money.

Using Medicare claims data, the Dartmouth Atlas shows that different hospitals deliver wildly differing amounts of care to patients with similar conditions and similar levels of illness. In two seminal papers published in 2003, Dartmouth’s Elliott Fisher showed that patients who had suffered a hip fracture, heart attack, or had colon cancer that needed surgery, got very different care, depending upon where they lived. For example, a heart attack patient who lives in, say, Los Angeles, will receive about $7,000-worth of extra care over the course of a year than a similar patient in Salem, Oregon. That $7,000 of extra Medicare spending in LA wasn’t due to higher prices, it went towards more services – more hospitalizations, more drugs, doctor visits, tests, and procedures.

Nobody disputes these variations in spending or utilization. The part that makes doctors and administrators in places like LA see red is Dartmouth’s conclusion that all that extra care doesn’t necessarily result in better outcomes. It’s mostly waste.

They worry that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will use Dartmouth data as a benchmark for measuring health care efficiency and try to wring savings out of the most inefficient regions — Los Angeles, for instance, down-state New York, all of New Jersey, Miami and McAllen, Texas (which was profiled as the most expensive town in America for health care in a New Yorker article). The Baucus health care reform bill would create and fund an “innovation center” within CMS, with broad powers to experiment with different payment options aimed at “bending the curve,” reining in the rate of growth of health care spending. According to Fisher, 20 to 30 percent of inpatient hospital days and 30 to 40 percent of specialist visits could be eliminated in the most inefficient hospitals without hurting patient outcomes.

To do that, CMS could employ a range of incentives such as a shared savings program, which would reward administrators for emulating more efficient hospitals – places like Intermountain Healthcare, in Utah, and the Geisinger Clinic of Pennsylvania, which were recently cited by President Obama as medical exemplars. Another way to control costs and encourage better care would be to spare providers in more efficient regions from across the board cuts in Medicare payments.  

Rather than stepping up to the plate and vowing to get to the bottom of their spending problem, some academic medical centers are instead attacking the Dartmouth findings. They explain away the data by saying their patients are poorer and sicker, and therefore need more care. In Los Angeles, for example, where 15 percent of the population is below the poverty line, the average Medicare recipient costs the federal government $10,810, compared with $6,705 per recipient in Minneapolis, where 10 percent of citizens are below the poverty line. 

This claim, that poverty and illness lie at the heart of variation in Medicare spending,  makes intuitive sense, but it doesn’t hold up to careful scrutiny. Poverty does influence health, but it can’t account for the extraordinary differences in the volume of care delivered by academic medical centers – even when they are located within a few miles of one another. In Manhattan, for example, chronically ill Medicare recipients, whether they are poor or not, are given about 40 percent more services at New York University Medical Center than nearby Columbia Presbyterian. In Chicago, African-American Medicare patients suffering from chronic illness, who are generally poorer than white beneficiaries, spent 46 percent more days in the hospital at Rush-Presbyterian than African-American beneficiaries using the University of Chicago. There’s no evidence that patients at Rush-Presbyterian and NYU are enjoying better outcomes.

Academic medical centers are supposed to lead medicine toward better, more effective care. They are typically considered centers of excellence, beacons of sound medical science. Trying to discredit the Dartmouth data is a distraction from the real work that’s needed to understand and remedy the extraordinary amount of money spent on care that does not appear to make a difference in health.

Shannon Brownlee is a Senior Research Fellow at the New America Foundation and author of Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer.

Yup, Miles Davis is about as far away from Lady Gaga as you can get. Monster Cable has yet another pair of headphones that are emblazoned with a famous musician’s name. And if you were here two sentences ago, you might have guessed that that artist is Miles Davis. You’re a good guesser!

You’ll find the headphones as part of the Miles Davis Tribute Set, which includes said headphones and a super-de-dooper deluxe copy of the jazz man’s famous album Kind of Blue (Note: I know nothing about jazz, but even I have heard of Kind of Blue). This deluxe version comes with a DVD, linear notes, yada yada yada.

So, basically, we’ve got a pair of Monster Cable headphones with a Miles Davis logo on it, and a spiffy version of his best known album. Price? Oh, you know, $400. (Eh, that may seem expensive, but headphones can get very expensive, very fast if you’re not careful.)

No release date, I’m afraid, but it is available for pre-order from Monster Cable’s Web site.

via iPodNN

We’ve tried to articulate this before when various (often self-proclaimed) elitists like Nicholas Carr, Andrew Keen or Mark Helprin bash the rise of social media or the fact that “anyone” can publish. They love to highlight all of the bad and ridiculous stuff that people decide to publish. And, no doubt, plenty more bad stuff gets published. But… at the same time, a lot more good stuff gets published as well. Umair Haque lays this out perfectly in talking about the new media landscape in terms of “soda” and “wine.”

Now consider an open mediascape. Here, there are a million blogs — or more — that are predictable, partisan, and pedestrian: soda. But the quality of information has already hit rock-bottom, and at the bottom, soda offered via blogs is just a substitute for a slightly different flavor of soda offered on shock radio. The soda anyone can now offer in an open mediaconomy isn’t that much worse than the soda that big producers already offer.< Here’s what’s different: the wine is of a higher quality. In an open mediascape, what is truly different is not the quality of soda, but the quality of wine. Sure, there are ten thousand rabid bloggers who have Glenn Beck on eternal robo-repeat. But I also have access to Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, Robert Reich, and Paul Romer. I can hang out with Barry Ritholtz, Fred Wilson, and Rick Bookstaber.

In an open mediaconomy, yes, there’s plenty lethally unhealthy soda on offer — but I also have access to a new world of fine wine. In a closed mediaconomy, I’m out of luck: I’m stuck mostly with soda.

The net effect is this. The worse stuff is not that much worse. But the good stuff is way, way better.

I’d argue that even if the worst stuff is worse (and, at times, it is), that doesn’t really matter, since the good stuff is still way, way better.

Separately, this argument applies in many other fields beyond just media as well. For example, we’ve seen claims that because societies that didn’t have strong patent laws exhibit lots of copying, it means that there’s no innovation that happens there. And, yet, that’s not really true at all. Yes, there’s a lot more copying, but that doesn’t preclude more innovation — and often that greater level of copying helps incentivize more innovation by giving those who can innovate more reason to try to stand out from the crowd. A perfect example of this is in the fashion space, where a lack of a fashion copyright has led to lots of competition — and, yes, lots of copying — but also a lot more innovation.

This can be difficult for some to understand, because they only look at the percentages, rather than the absolutes. They look at the percentage of those in the market producing “good content” or “innovating” and assume that’s the best way to measure. But if they looked at it from an absolute standpoint, concerning how much good content is being produced (while ignoring the bad content) or how much new innovation is being produced (ignoring the copying), they’d realize the actual, absolute, outcome is much better than before.

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In Q3, Uncle Sam was the green IT king maker. Read the, “Green IT Q3 Wrap-up.”

Gameloft just sent over this teaser trailer for an upcoming title, “Chuck Norris: Bring on the Pain”. Sure, Chuck’s a bit late to the iPhone game if he’s looking to milk this meme for all it’s worth – but we had to share the video with you, or he’d burst through our office wall and roundhouse kick us in the face. We didn’t want that to happen.

What not to do if you are a large company and have a secret project — ship a box full of relevant collateral to a retail locale with a stern looking label that reads “Don’t Open Until 10/25″. A new connect has come through with some pricing details on T-Mo’s Project Dark, and as usual, we’ve ripped it apart and deciphered it. Pics and pricing after the bounce.

Thanks, justfinethanku!

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• Unlmited Talk – $50
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Family Plan – Includes 2-lines + 2-year commitment

• 750 Minutes – $60
• 750 + Unlimited Text – $80
• 750 + Unlimited Text + Unlimited Web – $140
• 1500 Minutes – $80
• 1500 + Unlimited Text – $100
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• Unlimited Minutes – $100
• Unlimited Talk + Unlimited Text – $120
• Unlimited Talk + Unlimited Text + Unlimited Web – $180

Why be a video game rockstar if you can’t hear it? Have you always wanted to put your foot on something while you power chord-ed your way to stardom? For those of you who are using the stock speakers in your TV to play Rock Band, Guitar Hero, or Harmonica Hero, first off, shame on you.

The Stage-Gig speaker system is being debuted at the College Music Journal (CMJ) music festival in New York City. Modeled as a stage monitor, the Stage-Gig gives you a 6.5″ woofer, silk tweeter, all with 40 watts of output power. It has two sets of RCA plugs so you can theoretically chain as many of these units are you could possibly want.

If you don’t have any better speakers, these offer you a simple, plug-and-play upgrade for your game console. XBox, Playstation, Wii, anything that uses RCA audio outputs will work. Look for it in early November and expect to shell out $99.95.

Only a small percentage (9%) of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) currently use Twitter to market themselves, according to a new study by BIA/Kelsey.

In addition, 32 percent of SMBs report they plan to include social media in their marketing plans in the next 12 months by establishing a presence on social sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn or MySpace.

Stephen Marshall,
BIA Kelsey,
Director of Research
and Consulting

More than a third (39%) of SMBs plan to include customer ratings or reviews on their own websites in the next 12 months, and 31 percent plan to include links or ads placed on social sites or blogs.

"Social media is clearly gaining traction among SMB advertisers," said Steve Marshall, director of research and consulting, BIA/Kelsey. "As local consumers increasingly gravitate to social networks, local businesses understand they need to be part of the conversation."

"This opens up a market opportunity for local media companies that offer products and services that enable local advertisers to easily integrate social media into their marketing efforts."

The study found the adoption of social media by SMBs is more widespread among younger businesses. The percentage of SMBs by age of business currently using Twitter for promotion is as follows:

•   16 percent of SMBs in business three years or less
•   11 percent of SMBs in business four to six years
•   6 percent of SMBs in business seven to 10 years
•   2 percent of SMBs in business 11-plus years

John thinks he’s a major media figure on the Internet, but we all know that he’s just a dude that likes to review sex toys. Good thing CNN didn’t know that when they showed up at his front door with a camera and a list of Windows 7 questions. His spot starts at 1:38, btw.

It looks like “OBJECTION!” won’t be the only thing people shout into the DSi mic soon. A Nintendo error code spotted on the official Nintendo customer…

Japanese gaming mag Famitsu comes up big once again with a whole bunch of images from the scene’s hottest. Kotaku managed to get their hands on a wh…

The Tokyo Sky Tree broadcast tower, currently under construction, has been announced as the tallest building in the world once it’s completed (which will most probably be the case in the spring of 2012). But now Japan obviously fears to lose this (future) title to a tower currently under construction in Guangzhou Province in China, which seems to achieve a height of 610m.

The problem for Tokyo: This is the same height the city planned for Tokyo Sky Tree. And now Tobu Railway, the main company behind the building, plans to extend the height of the Sky Tree by 24m to 634 meters to really make it the tallest tower in the world.

From the beginning, the Sky Tree was designed to support a height of 640 meters, which means it won’t pose a problem for Tobu to just make the base that supports the antenna a bit taller.

The company says the new plan will neither delay the planned opening nor increase construction costs (which stand at $717 million).

Via Asahi Shimbun

If you picked up a copy of Borderlands for the PS3 hoping to get some co-op time with your friends, you may have to wait a while. Early purchasers hav…

It looks like more tangible product companies are trying to pretend they can restrict what you do with legally purchased products post-sale (perhaps they’re jealous of content companies). Case in point: my brother received the Nanda Clocky as a gift awhile back — it’s a pretty novel alarm clock, when it goes off, its wheels turn on, and it jumps off your dresser, forcing you to climb out of bed to turn it off. Since he already had an alarm clock that worked for him, he decided to sell it on eBay. A few days before his auction was supposed to close, he got a notice that his listing was removed for a “Trademark Violation – Unauthorized Item.” Yes, for a legitimately owned product. The email stated:

“Nanda Home Inc. is the owner of the intellectual property rights pertaining to these listings. By listing the ‘Clocky’ product you are in serious violation of the company’s rights. Additionally, Nanda Home does not permit the re-sale of any of their brand product on eBay. There are no authorized Nanda Home re-sellers on eBay. If you continue to list our items, further legal action may be taken.”

Clearly, Nanda has a gross misunderstanding of the right of people to re-sell their own property. While it’s true that it is against the law to sell counterfeit copies of a product, re-selling your own goods and representing them as “real” is completely within the bounds of the law, and eBay policy. To make matters worse, the condescending tone of the email also suggests that:

“You may need to take a tutorial. The next time you sell, you may be asked to take the tutorial, if it’s required. Once you’ve completed the tutorial successfully, please review your account status for any other possible concerns. If there are no other issues, you should be able to sell again.”

Or, perhaps Nanda and eBay should take a tutorial on the right of first sale. In the aforementioned tutorial, eBay clearly understands the right to re-sell (in fact, a huge part of its business relies upon this fact). Yet, to make matters worse under eBay policy it’s still a laborious process to get the item relisted — even with the bogus takedown notice. As a seller of an incorrectly taken down Clocky listing, you have to contact Nanda and have them specifically authorize your product to be re-listed. Yes, even though it’s Nanda who issued the incorrect takedown in the first place. So much for frictionless commerce.

The even bigger problem is in the process in which such listing takedowns are handled. Under the guise of rooting out counterfeit products, Nanda is able to unfairly reduce the number of its own secondhand goods in the marketplace. Other manufacturers have tried to do this in the past for everything from shampoo to radar detectors. And, much like the DMCA process, this “guilty until proven innocent” approach ultimately hurts the consumer, who now has unfairly reduced access to many products that were to be sold completely legally.

That said, my brother followed the eBay process to get his Clocky relisted. They sent him an email apologizing for their error and authorizing him to relist, which he did. Guess what? In an effort to punctuate how ridiculous this policy is, one day later, he got an email, “Trademark Violation – Unauthorized Item.”

Anyone want to buy a Clocky?

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Google has released a new iPhone app for Panoramio, which lets users upload photos right from their iPhone.

"Tens of millions of mobile users own a device with a good camera and GPS," said Fernando Delgado of Panoramio. "We realize that a lot of these users may want to share photos of places with the rest of the world via Google Maps and Google Earth."

"The philosophy behind the app is to keep it simple: sign in (only the first time), pick a photo from your device or take a new photo, and upload it straight to Panoramio," explains Delgado. "If available, the geoposition will be automatically set, and you can optionally add a title to the photo."

This is the first time Panoramio has released a mobile app, but Google says it is working on an Android application to compliment it.

Panoramio photos are used on Google Earth and Google Maps as photo layers, where people all over th world can see them. The service lets users tag their photos under categories like art, buildings, etc.