According to the American Diabetes Association (ADA), over 20 million adults and children are living with diabetes, and another 54 million are affected by pre-diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is the most common type (between 90-95% of all diabetes cases) and is often referred to as adult-onset diabetes. It occurs when the body can no longer process insulin properly, which may lead to hypoglycemia or hyperglycemia.
The ADA has issued new guidelines lowering the glucose level range for what is considered pre-diabetes and diabetes and recommends all adults over the age of 45 have their blood sugar screened every three years.
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20
March
Application for Healthcare Treatment is RejectedThe Kansas City Star chronicles the story of Julia Slaven, who was fighting multiple myeloma, a cancer of the immune system’s plasma cells. She also was fighting her health insurer, Coventry Health Care of Kansas Inc. Coventry had refused to cover a second stem-cell transplant (more...)
14
March
In the May 28 issue of JAMA, Steven Woolf provides a particularly insightful commentary on the case for allocating more resources to primary prevention.
The commentary does not feature an abstract, but Wooff clearly "gets it," and addresses a number of crucial points we've mentioned here on MH Blog, including:
the improvements in health and the reduction in human suffering (what Wolff terms the "compress[ion] of morbidity") that prevention and public health promises (based on excellent evidence);the "paradox" that we invest approximately 1-3% of health care expenditures;prevention and public health feature a lower cost-effectiveness ratio than other forms of health care (such as treatment), and are therefore preferable even if prevention does not "save money" due to the prevention paradox;that the attention given to negative results obtained for some prevention activities both downplays the abundant evidence for numerous prevention activities that do work and ignores the "absence of an infrastructure for implementation;"and notes that the issue is not one of absolute dollars, but of relative priority (i.e., how we allocate the dollars we are already spending):
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5
March
Key No. 6: Service Service Service.
It sounds like a platitude to say that “the most important thing you can do for your clinic is to provide your patients with first rate service from the first phone call”. Most of us have heard many times that customer service is probably the most important factor in the success of any business. Nonetheless, it may still surprise you that YOU (the physician) rank a lowly FOURTH in the hierarchy of “the top four factors influencing patient satisfaction” in a survey of family practice clinics conducted by the Horizon Group Ltd in 1997.
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3
March