I'm going to relive my junior high years. I'm watching "The Passion of Christ" tomorrow. It will be like me going to Stations of the Cross every Friday before easter. I wonder if I'll feel 13 again while watching the movie.

Oh my willies! It's hailing in San Francisco!!! What gives?

I found this course at the UC Berkeley Extension site. That job I interviewed for wants a person who can forecast how and why healthcare consumers make decisions about where to seek medical treatment.

The Economics of Health: Current Issues and Dilemmas

Choices about health care are often considered unique and separate from other choices we make in life. From an economic perspective, all choices depend on the availability of scarce resources, on alternative uses of these resources, and on differing human wants. This course emphasizes current issues and dilemmas facing health policy makers, and explores how and in what manner effective health choices can be made by individuals, institutions, and society.

I just figured something out. That company I interviewed with this morning doesn't really want someone who can data model. They want someone who can build a logical decision making tool that weights all these different pieces of information. And the pieces of information won't necessarily be all the same either or easily quantifiable.

How do you weight something abstract like quality of care as opposed to the numbers of procedures performed per 1,000 members? Which one is more important in eyes of a healthcare consumer?

What they really want and need is a biostatistician, and I'm definitely not that. They told me they don't want a biostatistician, but that's what the job really sounds like. Or maybe they need to say they want someone with a masters in Public Health.