Ryan Phelan started DNADirect to expand the power of genetic testing to everyone, using the Web. She’s been ploughing a tough furrow but been making some real progress in the last few years, including getting an investment from Lemhi Ventures and working with Humana to provide genetic testing to its members (and the utilization management going along with it), to go along with their initialDTC approach.
Late last week DNADirect was purchased by Medco. I spoke with Ryan and Robert Epstein, Chief Medical Officer of Medco to get just a taste of what this will mean for the future of DNA testing within Medco.
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8
February
Every now and then, I read and enjoy a book, but only later fully appreciate it as its lessons and insights slowly become apparent. Judging by the number of times I’ve said, “That reminds me of Gawande’s observations about ___” over the past month, The Checklist Manifesto is one such book.
In this short, deceptively simple volume, Atul (who I count as both friend and inspiration) discusses the history of “the lowly checklist,” the impact of checklists on various industries, how he came to understand the value of checklists to medical care, and what makes a useful checklist. Most of this content could have been written by a thoughtful healthcare journalist. But Atul put his interest in checklists to practical use, spearheading a WHO initiative to test a checklist-based “safe surgery” program in 8 diverse hospitals around the world, an effort that saved hundreds of lives. His description of this program forms the core of the book.
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8
February
http://www.newberry.org/renaissance/conf-inst/diseasedisability.html
Newberry Library
Center for Renaissance Studies
Symposium on Disease and Disability in the Middles Ages and Renaissance
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Ruggles Hall, The Newberry Library
Due to space restrictions, registration in advance is required (see
below).
9:30 a.m. Coffee and continental breakfast
10:00 a.m.
Disability in the Middle Ages
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8
February
Member Badges
Identify your site as part of the most respected physician community on the web. Insert the following code into the HTML of your web site to place a Medspa MD Member Badge.
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8
February
Sometimes with something so egregious gets written that, even if it’s in the Wall Street Journal, you have to notice it. Angela Braly, the CEO of Wellpoint—compensation a hair under $10m in 2009—ought to be happy, even though Joseph Rago in the WSJ is surprised about that. It looks like the health reform bill which put much of Wellpoint’s highly profitable individual and small group business at risk is dead, and this week Wellpoint started putting up rates between 35% and 80% in the California market (where it’s Anthem Blue Cross).
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7
February
If the clients won't come to you, then you can go to your clients. At least for product sales, that is. A new trend that many aesthetic practices are adopting is online product sales. It's attractive for many reasons:
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7
February
The (not huge) world of Health 2.0, participatory medicine and ePatients has been fretting itself about a comment Susannah Fox (all hail) elevated into a post called “What’s the Point of Health 2.0”.
Here’s an excerpt from the comment from DarthMed,
The remaining 95% of “patients” out there are not motivated to become informed, or invest the time/energy/money in using any of these tools. These are the folks that know that fast food isn’t healthy, but are just too tired to choose differently. Some (emphasis on some) will do a standard google search when they receive a new diagnosis at best. Yet these are the folks – often folks with multiple chronic (often preventable) health problems, many overweight, on multiple medications, sometimes social problems – that have the real issue that needs fixing.
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6
February
Zerona and Zeltliq booth promise to freeze fat and shed pounds well enough that it would be a slam dunk to add these treatments to your medical spa or laser clinic. But do they work?
Here's some commentary from the NY Times Story
Doctors and patients alike are excited by the prospect of having new technologies that can attack fat without surgery. It is too early, however, for consumers to know how effectively either device works. That hasn’t stopped men and women unhappy with back fat and muffin tops from paying thousands for treatment in recent months...
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5
February
Are we finally ready to close the door on the much-disputed link between the MMR vaccine and autism?
On January 30, Britain’s General Medical Council ruled that Andrew Wakefield, a gastroenterologist, had acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly” in conducting his research that established a link between autism and the MMR vaccine. And yesterday, the British medical journal Lancet finally retracted the resulting 1998 study authored by Wakefield that helped drive MMR vaccination rates in the U.K. down to the point where in 2008, measles was officially declared “endemic” in the country.
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5
February
Lumosity users and research collaborators often ask us for more information on the science that goes into the games and training applications on the site. To help make this info more accessible, we have just published The Science Behind Lumosity.
This document describes the background brain science, the principles upon which the brain games and courses were designed, and some of the research done using Lumosity. The goal was to break down the science of Lumosity into terms that anyone can understand while creating a comprehensive and precise presentation of the research.
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4
February