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Thursday, December 31, 2015
2015's Best Health Care Journalism | The Advisory Board Daily Briefing
It is that time of the year when we all look back at the best and the worst of the past Today's post on the last day of the half-way mark of the second decaded of the millenium is based upon several articles published in The Advisory Board Company.
Any author uses multiple sources in their writings. Health care is no different and much of what I write about has already been published elsewhere. It is certainly not in the category of 'academic writing'
I share this stage with many authors, most of whom are far more literate than me.
Rather than copying and pasting phrases from those sources, I bring you several links which should make it easier for readers to 'funnel' their writings. .
2015's best health care journalism | The Advisory Board Daily Briefing
Monday, December 28, 2015
Update for followers not using a Google Account
TranslateAn update on Google Friend Connect
Posted: December 21, 2015
In 2011, we announced the retirement of Google Friend Connect for all non-Blogger sites. We made an exception for Blogger to give readers an easy way to follow blogs using a variety of accounts. Yet over time, we’ve seen that most people sign into Friend Connect with a Google Account. So, in an effort to streamline, in the next few weeks we’ll be making some changes that will eventually require readers to have a Google Account to sign into Friend Connect and follow blogs.
As part of this plan, starting the week of January 11, we’ll remove the ability for people with Twitter, Yahoo, Orkut or other OpenId providers to sign in to Google Friend Connect and follow blogs. At the same time, we’ll remove non-Google Account profiles so you may see a decrease in your blog follower count.
We encourage you to tell affected readers (perhaps via a blog post), that if they use a non-Google Account to follow your blog, they need to sign up for a Google Account, and re-follow your blog. With a Google Account, they’ll get blogs added to their Reading List, making it easier for them to see the latest posts and activity of the blogs they follow.
We know how important followers are to all bloggers, but we believe this change will improve the experience for both you and your readers.
Posted by Michael Goddard, Software Engineer
13 Habits of Exceptionally Likeable People page 1
Happiness is elusive for many people. It requires a re-boot of your personna. traits for unhappy people
Here are some traits of unhappiness
1. You have a reactive personality you respond to external stimuli immediately with an intense emotional response. You fail to detach yourself from the event. Some events however are very difficult to externalize, such as divorce, death of a spouse, going to prison, loss of employment, and bankruptcy plus many others. However you cannot generalized. Stress for one person may be quite different from another.
2.You are driven for success, as measured by money
3. You see things as good or bad, black or white.
4. You fail to learn from negative experience.
5.. You have few friends
6.. You do not exercise and/or have poor nutritional habits.
7. You feel like a failure due to finances, divorce, rejection, failure to accomplish a goal.
The good news is that all can be altered.
13 Habits of Exceptionally Likeable People
Here are some traits of unhappiness
1. You have a reactive personality you respond to external stimuli immediately with an intense emotional response. You fail to detach yourself from the event. Some events however are very difficult to externalize, such as divorce, death of a spouse, going to prison, loss of employment, and bankruptcy plus many others. However you cannot generalized. Stress for one person may be quite different from another.
2.You are driven for success, as measured by money
3. You see things as good or bad, black or white.
4. You fail to learn from negative experience.
5.. You have few friends
6.. You do not exercise and/or have poor nutritional habits.
7. You feel like a failure due to finances, divorce, rejection, failure to accomplish a goal.
The good news is that all can be altered.
13 Habits of Exceptionally Likeable People
Saturday, December 26, 2015
Thursday, December 24, 2015
MentalHealthDigitalInnovationChallenge
MentalHealthDigitalInnovationChallenge
MedStartr grew out of the New York Health Innovation Meetup Group, also called Health 2.0 NYC or just H2NYC. H2NYC has been creating live events intended to foster an ecosystem around healthcare innovation since 2008. We also have been recording them, livestreaming them, and publishing them online since 2010. Today our events bring the crowd to crowdfunding all over the World, jumpstarting healthcare innovation ecosystems everywhere we go. To learn more about how we can help your organization or municipality please contact us.
Are we using technology in the field of mental health?
Barriers to care
1. Cost
2. Uncertainty about insurance coverage
3. Accessibility (difficulty in finding care)
4. Societal stigma about therapy.
UPLIFT
The innovation challenge and answer
Smart phone based, and readily available for a one time fee of $ 10.00 Inexpensive, and scalable.
It uses a proven evidence based therapeutic process CBT (cognitive based therapy). CBT is the most evidence based therapy in development for 50 years. There have been 19 randomized controlled studies of computeried programs for depressed adults. Over 50% of people needing therapy for major depression do not get it. And only one in five received APA standardized treatment.
Uplift is an adaptive treatment. It if flexible and follows exactly the practice pattern of CBT, and assigns homework to the patient, verifying their progress.
At the current time there are no programs such as this available on the iTunes store or Google Play.
The need is apparent. There are 12 million clinically depressed individuals who have access to a smart phone.
U.S mental health care $147 billion/year
Can therapy be computerized ? According to Psious, a hardware/software combination Virtual Reality applicatioin is already being used by psychotherapists to duplicate anxiety producing scenarios (anxiety, phobias such as agrophobia), During the process behavioral modification takes place.
Biofeedback Module
VR Headset and Smartphone
Courage is a novel game playing platform for the treament of depression
Wednesday, December 16, 2015
The Experts Were Wrong About the Best Places for Better and Cheaper Health Care - The New York Times
As part of his push for the Affordable Care Act in 2009, President Obama came to Central High School to laud this community as a model of better, cheaper health care. “You’re getting better results while wasting less money,” he told the crowd. His visit had come amid similar praise from television broadcasts, a documentary film and a much-read New Yorker article.
All of the attention stemmed from academic work showing that Grand Junction spent far less money on Medicare treatments – with no apparent detriment to people’s health. The lesson seemed obvious: If the rest of the country became more like Grand Junction, this nation’s notoriously high medical costs would fall.
But a new study casts doubt on that simple message.- Oops !
The Price Ain’t Right? Hospital Prices and Health Spending on the Privately Insured*
Moreover, whereas Medicare
hospital prices are set by a regulator (as is true for prices for health care services in most
countries), hospital prices for the privately insured are market-determined. However, this may change wth the Affordable Care Act, the transition from volume based reimbursement to new models of care, including quality of care and HEDIS scores which reflect hospital and health care compliance with recomendations from NQAH.
hospital prices are set by a regulator (as is true for prices for health care services in most
countries), hospital prices for the privately insured are market-determined. However, this may change wth the Affordable Care Act, the transition from volume based reimbursement to new models of care, including quality of care and HEDIS scores which reflect hospital and health care compliance with recomendations from NQAH.
Health care providers’
transaction prices – have been treated as commercially sensitive and have been largely
unavailable to researchers. As a result, there is a great deal that is unknown about how and why
health care providers’ prices vary across the nation and the extent to which providers’ negotiated
prices influence overall health spending for the privately insured.
transaction prices – have been treated as commercially sensitive and have been largely
unavailable to researchers. As a result, there is a great deal that is unknown about how and why
health care providers’ prices vary across the nation and the extent to which providers’ negotiated
prices influence overall health spending for the privately insured.
Add to that is the complex algorithm upon which payments are based, including the DRG (Diagnostic Related Group). There are roughly 999 listed by CMS Future payments will be altered by a penalty for non-compliance with the standards... It is not really an incentive where hospitals would be rewarded with an increase in payments, but a penalty for not complying, another negative incentive. Do more, get paid less.
The research looked not only at Medicare but also at a huge, new database drawn from private-insurance plans – the sorts used by most Americans for health care. And it shows that places that spend less on Medicare do not necessarily spend less on health care over all. Grand Junction, as it happens, is one of the most expensive health care markets in the country for the privately insured – despite its unusually low spending on Medicare.
All of these figures were based upon 2011, prior to the Affordable Care Act. Stay tuned for more gobbledy-gook.
The Experts Were Wrong About the Best Places for Better and Cheaper Health Care - The New York Times
Thursday, December 10, 2015
Alarming News About Your Physician(s) Burnout increasing among U.S. doctors
Burnout among U.S. doctors is getting worse, according to a study that shows physicians are worse off today than just three years earlier. Mayo Clinic researchers, working with the American Medical Association, compared data from 2014 to measures they collected in 2011 and found higher measures on the classic signs of professional burnout. More than half of physicians felt emotionally exhausted and ineffective. More than half also said that work was less meaningful.
The data dovetail with a recent JAMA study, which found much greater prevalence of depression among doctors in training than in the general population.
Washington Post
This should be alarming news for you as a patient. Why ? Is your physician worried about making payroll,overhead expenses, saving for retirement, educating his/her children, and the immediate need for paying off astronomical student loans between $100,000 dollars and $250,000 dollars. Shouldn't your physicians be using all their energy for caring for you and also continuing medical education. The prospect of a medico-legal misadventure are highly probable in a physician's career. The professional bar for performance is very high (as it should be). The vast majority of physicians are not self-serving and have am ethical and moral interest in your health. Few enter the profession with the idea of becoming rich, only to maintain a reasonable standard of living, educate their children and save for retirement. Their income results in a considerable tax responsibility. If one is a small practice doctor the personal financial liabilities are immense for overhead, dues, subscription fees, professional society dues, state licensees, the cost of specialty recertification and more.
Taken together, experts say the problems require solutions that offer a systemic approach. All health care organizations have a shared responsibility to address the situation, they add.
The responsibility is not just for health care organizations, but is that of general society to protect those who sacrifice much to care for you.. When was the last time you asked your physician how he was doing ? If you like your doctor, perhaps a letter to your congressman or senator stating what you observe and not demand unreasonable bureaucracy being placed upon your caregivers. They serve you, the patient, healthy, sick or otherwise. They are not government employees unless they work for a state, county, or federal agency such as the Veterans Administration, military service, or public health agency. The vast majority of doctors are now seeking employment, just to escape the endless worsening tunnels of managed care, federal regulations and mandates for automated medicine, electronic health records. All of these factors shorten a career life add disability issues and increase the shortage of physicians.. There are few highly paid specialty groups, radiology, neurosurgery, and several interventional medical specialties, such as gastroenterology, and cardiology.
It would be a unique experience to see how federal regulations could be designed to lower stress and cost for physicians.
I am not holding my breath.
Burnout increasing among U.S. doctors - The Washington Post
Signs of depression are 'unacceptably high' among doctors in training, study finds
Friday, December 4, 2015
Monday, November 30, 2015
The Most Common Causes of Eye Injuries in the US
In the past the most common causes of eye injuries was 4th of July fire crackers, baseball injuries or racketball injuries. Today the incidence of those causes have almost been eliminated by prevention. Most localities ban fireworks, the use of protective eye wear in sports, and in occupations has almost completely eliminated eye injuries from those sources.
Falling was the No. 1 cause of eye injuries overall and accounted for more than 8,425 hospitalizations. Researchers also found that the cost to treat eye injuries at hospitals rose by 62 percent during that period and now exceeds $20,000 per injury.
Serious ocular trauma injuries include orbital fractures and being pierced by objects. These injuries can be expensive to treat, and in many cases are preventable. With that in mind, researchers at Johns Hopkins University decided to identify the most common causes of eye injuries as well as the associated hospital costs so that prevention efforts could be better targeted. Such interventions could perhaps lower eye injury rates and overall health care costs for eye trauma inpatient visits.
•Kids injured in accidents, vehicle collisions and by sharp objects:
For children ages 10 and under, the leading cause of eye injury was being struck by accident by a person or object. Car crashes and accidentally being pierced or cut by a sharp object (such as scissors) were second and third on the list of causes.
•The median cost of treating these eye injuries shot up from $12,430 to $20,116 between the years 2002 to 2011, an increase of 62 percent. The researchers found costs to be higher at large hospitals and for older patients. Income did not correlate with costs. However, the Johns Hopkins team says that other factors not included in the study could play a role, too. More...
It is recommended that you wear protective eye wear when fighting, sanding metal, and other objects, playing baseball, or racketball, and target practice,
The Most Common Causes of Eye Injuries in the US
Falling was the No. 1 cause of eye injuries overall and accounted for more than 8,425 hospitalizations. Researchers also found that the cost to treat eye injuries at hospitals rose by 62 percent during that period and now exceeds $20,000 per injury.
Serious ocular trauma injuries include orbital fractures and being pierced by objects. These injuries can be expensive to treat, and in many cases are preventable. With that in mind, researchers at Johns Hopkins University decided to identify the most common causes of eye injuries as well as the associated hospital costs so that prevention efforts could be better targeted. Such interventions could perhaps lower eye injury rates and overall health care costs for eye trauma inpatient visits.
They identified a sample of nearly 47,000 patients ages 0 to 80 diagnosed with ocular trauma from 2002 to 2011 using a national health care database. They examined the total cost of hospitalization, cause of injury, type of injury and length of hospital stay. The researchers then grouped injured people by age. Their findings include:
•Falls are the leading cause of eye injury:
Most of the 8,425 falls recorded happened to those 60 and older. Among the types of falls, slipping caused nearly 3,000 eye injuries. Falling down stairs was cited as a cause of eye injury 900 times.
•Fighting was second most common cause of ocular trauma:
In total, nearly 8,000 hospitalizations for eye injuries were caused by fighting and various types of assault.
“Unarmed fight or brawl” came in at No. 2 overall among specific causes of eye injuries requiring hospitalization, but was the top cause reported for ages 10 to 59.
•Fighting was second most common cause of ocular trauma:
In total, nearly 8,000 hospitalizations for eye injuries were caused by fighting and various types of assault.
“Unarmed fight or brawl” came in at No. 2 overall among specific causes of eye injuries requiring hospitalization, but was the top cause reported for ages 10 to 59.
•Kids injured in accidents, vehicle collisions and by sharp objects:
•The median cost of treating these eye injuries shot up from $12,430 to $20,116 between the years 2002 to 2011, an increase of 62 percent. The researchers found costs to be higher at large hospitals and for older patients. Income did not correlate with costs. However, the Johns Hopkins team says that other factors not included in the study could play a role, too. More...
It is recommended that you wear protective eye wear when fighting, sanding metal, and other objects, playing baseball, or racketball, and target practice,
The Most Common Causes of Eye Injuries in the US
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