From realtime to person-to-person and crypto, digital payments continue to change the payments landscape in the United States. Even so, cash is back, to the detriment of one growing business, as covered in this issue's links.

Corporates are paying attention to realtime payments

On March 22, 2018, Mission Health in Asheville, North Carolina announced its intention to sell its seven-hospital not-for-profit (NFP) health system to HCA Healthcare, the nation’s largest for-profit healthcare system. The parties expect to sign definitive sale agreements by mid-summer and finalize the transaction by year-end. [1]

I just published article on the Summit of the Americas in Lima, Peru.  Although the article was written before the missile strike in Syria, and doesn't capture the impact of the action on the summit agenda, I believe that the basic analysis of the conservative trend in the region is consistent with what happened at the summit, and the article's arguments about the agenda for the Americas may continue to be of use to you as a point of reference. This article was originally published by the Global Americans.

Goodbye “Dr. Know-It-All”: Medicine’s Liberating Knowledge Explosion

The digitization and globalization of medical information is overwhelming traditional medical practices. Physicians confront a continuous avalanche of medical discoveries on disease origins, symptoms and treatments. By 2020, medical knowledge will double every 73 days.[1]

Spring has been a bit tardy this year in the US, and I hear many other places, but not in Asia.  The title of a recent Brookings meeting at Northwestern University was “Japan, the United States, and the Future of Asia”  but the topic was Korea.  I posed the question of whether or not we are experiencing a false spring. Talks between the two Koreas, the US and China are certainly a hopeful development, but do they mask fundamental and growing divisions between the major powers in the Pacific? Together, these countries comprise half of global GDP.