What a year – full of joy and inspiring encounters, but also sadness and pain. Memories have been made in our family in 2025 and lost as well – as my dad moves down the inevitable path of cognitive decline. With that came many difficult decisions to make but also the heartfelt will to share […]
It is almost exactly six years ago that I diverted from my path home on a pre-Xmas evening and followed the flow of people inside the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, not knowing that I would attend the last Christmas concert in this spiritual place for six years to come. Four months later, on […]
As summer is coming to an end, we reflect on what we have learned and what we might need to cultivate further as we prepare for la rentrée in September. Access to a wealth of knowledge from anywhere does not seem a challenge anymore – if we have functioning internet and are fine with consumption […]
“If you have something to say, and a desire to work, you take a piece of stone – which you can find anywhere – then grab a hammer and chisel,” stated the sculptor Costantin Brancusi more than a hundred years ago. When I recently visited Brancusi’s Retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, I was […]
There is not much “light” in the City of Lights this holiday season I realized, running around in pre-Christmas Paris. Of course, the big department stores have put up their usual tam-tam, but the little streets in the various villages and neighborhoods of Paris are darker than they used to be: “it doesn’t pay off” […]
When I was invited to deliver the opening keynote at Cornell’s Virtual Care Symposium in NYC this past week, I took some time to reflect on what virtual horizons in global patient care look like considering major advances in digital health, a global pandemic, and last but not least, artificial intelligence. While I was working […]
Something went wrong in healthcare – systems around the world seem to be “broken” to a larger or lesser extent and while we diagnose “problems” (rising expenditures, worse outcomes, longer wait times, overworked staff… I could go on and on) there seems to be no urge, no lobby, no real impetus, and courage to get […]
“La rentrée” – back to school it is. Re-entering the world of daily duties & delights. Reconnecting after the summer bears its own excitement: looking back to picking up the thread where we had left off and looking forward to seeding the seeds for new beginnings in 2024.
I received many emails in response to the first part of my perspective “On the importance of building something together” which led me to the – at least preliminary – conclusion that it pays off to collaborate. However, this individual or also collective pay-off is very diverse as expected. Joint themes circled around “meaning”, “learning”, […]
“If we wait for governments, it will be too late. If we act as individuals, it will be too little. But if we act as communities, it might just be enough, and it might just be in time,” said Rob Hopkins, pointing towards climate change and how it could be tackled. Communities are everywhere these […]