Tag: Uncategorized

Fighting AIDS for decades

Dec 1, 2008

By Sarah Arnquist

Every 9.5 minutes, someone in the United States is infected with HIV. Every 33 minutes, someone in the U.S. dies from AIDS.

While great gains have been made in the fight against HIV, still more than 53,000 new HIV infections occurred in 2006 and it predominately burdens minority communities. Young, black men and women are at the highest risk of new infection. The HIV incidence rate for black females is nearly 15 times the rate for white females, according to the CDC.

Today is the 20th anniversary of World AIDS Day. Here are some links to excellent summaries of the progress in fighting HIV in the U.S. and around the world.

Message from World Health Organization Director-General Margaret Chan.
Updated estimated U.S. incidence of HIV from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
World Aids Day Blog.
Aids.gov HIV & AIDS quick facts.

Engage With Grace

Nov 26, 2008• 5

By Alexandra Drane &
The Engage with Grace Team

We make choices throughout our lives — where we want to live, what types
of
activities will fill our days, with whom we spend our time.

These choices
are often a balance between our desires and our means, but at the end of the
day, they are decisions made with intent. But when it comes to how we want
to be treated at the end our lives, often we don’t express our intent or
tell our loved ones about it.

This has real consequences. 73% of Americans would prefer to die at home,
but up to 50% die in hospital. More than 80% of Californians say their loved
ones "know exactly" or have a "good idea" of what their wishes would be if
they were in a persistent coma, but only 50% say they’ve talked to them
about their preferences.But our end of life experiences are about a lot more
than statistics. They’re about all of us.

A “blog rally” to improve the end-of-life journey

Nov 26, 2008• 1

By Sarah Arnquist

At least 40 health bloggers plan to post a notice about Engage With Grace: The One Slide Project this Thanksgiving weekend. The Health Care Blog thanks them for their support.

Matthew and Alexandra Drane, CEO of Eliza Corp., came up with the idea after discovering they shared a similar interest in improving end-of-life care. Watch the video below to learn more about Alex’s sister-in-law’s end-of-life journey that inspired this campaign.

Paul Levy, CEO of Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital and author of the Running a Hospital Blog, jumped in and has championed this mission around the blogosphere and Facebook. In the process, he coined a new term "blog rally" — blogs posting on the same topic to raise awareness.

Engage with Grace from Health 2.0 on Vimeo.

Here’s the list of participating bloggers we’d like to thank:

America’s CEOs set priorities for Obama Administration

Nov 21, 2008• 11

By Brian Klepper

This past Monday and Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal convened an extraordinary conference of about 100 CEOs to develop and recommend issue priorities for the new Administration. (See the participant list here.)

This meeting brought together the nation’s industry power players. Several Senators and Congressional representatives participated, as well as Rahm Emanuel, the President-elect’s new Chief of Staff, and others who advise Mr. Obama.

Based on their business’ core focus, the attendees were assigned into four major areas: 1) Finance and the US Economy, 2) Energy and the Environment, 3) American and the Global Economy, and 4) Health Care.

Then in the General Session that followed, the focus groups’ recommendations were incorporated into a final list and reranked by all the participants. Here’s the graph showing the relative ranking of all issues.

Consumer-Generated Clinical Trials? Research Minus Science = Gossip

Nov 21, 2008• 7

By Val Jones MD

Valjones My readers know how passionate I am about
protecting the public from misleading health information. I
have
witnessed first-hand
many well-meaning attempts to “empower consumers” with Web 2.0 tools.
Unfortunately, they were designed without a clear understanding of the
scientific method, basic statistics, or in some cases, common sense.

Let me first say that I desperately want my patients to be
knowledgeable about their disease or condition. The quality of their
self-care depends on that, and I regularly point each of my patients to
trusted sources of health information so that they can be fully
informed about all aspects of their health. Informed decisions are
founded upon good information. But when the foundation is corrupt –
consumer empowerment collapses like a house of cards.

In a recent lecture on Health 2.0, it was suggested that websites
that enable patients to “conduct their own clinical trials” are the
bold new frontier of research. This assertion betrays a lack of
understanding of basic scientific principles. In healthcare we often
say, “the plural of anecdote is not data” and I would translate that to
“research minus science equals gossip.” Let me give you some examples
of Health 2.0 gone wild:

Fighting Alzheimer’s one ribbon at a time

Nov 21, 2008• 2

Ribbon By THCB Staff

Caring.com and the Alzheimer’s Association have teamed up to spread awareness about the disease through an online
Purple
Ribbon campaign.

The official campaign ended earlier this year with 1,000 blogs and websites displaying the purple ribbon, but ribbons are still available for creating. For each ribbon created, Caring.com donates $10 to the Alzheimer’s Association for education programs.

Anyone who wants to help
raise awareness for Alzheimer’s disease can create a free web ribbon with just a few clicks. You can personalize the ribbon with a
loved one’s name and it comes in different shades and sizes to
match your website or blog.

Also, if you’re an adult child or caregiver caring for a parent or loved
one with Alzheimer’s, visit the Alzheimer’s and Other Dementias section
of Caring.com for helpful information and resources.

Could a larger investment in primary care cure the health care system?

Nov 21, 2008• 19

By Deron Schriver

I’m going to go out on a big ol’ limb here by saying that 90 percent of our health care problems could be solved by rebuilding and refocusing our primary care delivery system.

It’s the issue most discussed issue in reform circles (aside from single-payer) and it makes perfect sense. Toyota has succeeded because it goes to great lengths to find the true source of quality issues. They have recognized that addressing root causes significantly limits efforts needed because you avoid treating secondary level problems that occur further down the line.

A highly trained, appropriately paid primary care physician with a focus on prevention, coordination and patient education could solve so many other problems. There are many preventable chronic illnesses out there driving up our costs.

A Great American Smokeout, but where’s the coverage to help people quit?

Nov 20, 2008• 1

By Mitchell Katz Mitchkatz

Today is the Great American Smokeout, and while San Franciscans are doing their part to help people battle nicotine addiction, I became aware recently that not all the health insurance plans for our county workers in San Francisco — nor in many other counties around California – were covering all of the smoking cessation benefits recommended by the Center for Disease Control.

The City of San Francisco has embraced a multi-faceted approach to reduce tobacco use, while protecting individuals from insurance coverage barriers as they battle their addiction to nicotine:

We have endorsed a policy calling on the health plans that provide health insurance coverage for City and County employees to offer comprehensive smoking cessation benefits consistent with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines.

The City of San Francisco covers smoking cessation services and treatments for the uninsured.

According to the CDC, the most effective health insurance benefits are those that include patient reimbursements for smoking cessation counseling and FDA-approved pharmacotherapeutic treatments, and reimbursements to clinicians for providing tobacco dependence treatment, just as they are reimbursed for treating other chronic conditions.

This isn’t the early 1990s

Nov 20, 2008• 10

By Sarah Arnquist

Several stories in today’s papers make it clear that the atmosphere for health reform today truly is different than when the Clinton Administration took over in the 1990s.

Here’s the bullet points in support of that thesis:

Obama selected veteran policymaker Tom Daschle to head up the Department of Health and Human Services, signaling he wants the former South Dakota Senator to head up reform efforts.
The Washington Post quoted Sen. Ron Wyden
(D-Ore.) saying, "Tom Daschle sees this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. On the premier domestic issue of our time, the
president-elect sees Tom Daschle with the skills and abilities to bring
people together and get this over the finish line."

Marking a clear deviation from the past, the Association of Health Insurance Plans announced
it would be willing to accept guarantee issue and community rating in
exchange for a mandate requiring all people to buy insurance.

Seven Senators promised to work together on health care to accomplish something next year. They are: Max Baucus of Montana, Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, all Democrats, and Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming, Charles E. Grassley of Iowa and Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, Republicans.

But Bob Laszewski provides WSJ readers with a reality check, "Talk is cheap on the front end of this thing," he told the Journal. "The
rubber hits the road when that 1,000-page document comes out with
specifics."

More on Health 2.0 & Ix Synergies

Nov 20, 2008• 1

By Josh Seidman
H20logo

Our IxAction Alliance focused our monthly IxInsights Webinar this week on the synergies between Health 2.0 and information therapy (Ix). This marks the first of a series of activities for the IxCenter on the H20-Ix intersection as we gear up for next spring’s “Health 2.0 Meets Ix” conference in Boston (April 22-23, 2009).

In today’s Webinar, Indu Subaiya, Matthew Holt, and I provided some context for the exploration of the intersection of these two movements. We focused on several key tensions and challenges including:

* Building Health 2.0 into the delivery system * Trust, personalization & participatory medicine * What is the future role of the doctor? * Info-mediaries: Human & automated navigation * Knowledge creation: expert vs. wiki * User-generated health care

We heard from five different innovative companies that have created Ix-oriented Health 2.0 applications.

* Enhanced Medical Decisions * Krames * Healthwise * Silverlink * bWell Informed

As we move forward, we’re going to tackle a variety of questions, such as:

What are the biggest needs in health care that Ix and Health 2.0 could solve?
What are the “home runs” at the intersection of Ix and Health 2.0?
What are the most important issues, tools and technologies that we should cover at our April conference?

This is a great time to help shape our agenda. What do you think?