Here’s a pop quiz on health reform: Which prominent Republican said the following:
And if you don’t [oppose this health care legislation] and if I don’t do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.
I had not time to unpack before writing yesterday’s blog…….but after doing so you probably heard me scream ‘BUGGER’…………..let me explain.As you know I hate to fly…..not just the bit in the plane but the aftermath……….the baggage reclaim hall. This isn’t because I don’t like crowds or trolleys or people in flip-flops and shorts ………….No, [...]
As we work to change health care in America, we must recognize the need to dramatically change diabetes.
Twenty-four million Americans have diabetes at a cost to our nation of an estimated $218 billion for diabetes and pre-diabetes, according to a series of studies recently published in Population Health Management. Imagine the effects diabetes will have on our health and economy in the future if we don’t take action now.
Medicare's recent policy of refusing to pay hospitals' additional costs to treat hospital-acquired infections fails to adequately incentivize prevention and proper treatment of these complications, associated with 99,000 deaths annually. A recent analysis by Peter McNair and colleagues in the journal Health Affairs suggests that, in the entire state of California, only 11 hospitalizations complicated by infection would have received lower reimbursement as a result of the policy if it had been in place in 2006.
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I still read the articles every day that Google and the rest of my searches spit into my inbox. But as the sausage gets made I despair for the country. Not so long ago the NY Times met the Rush Limbaugh fan who decries the government takeover of health care, even though his wife ran up $68,000 in care while she had breast cancer and no insurance. Somehow because his local hospital let him off the charges, he thinks that the system was OK, and drove for an hour to shout at a Democrat who wanted to change it! (Of course the taxpayer absorbed the costs).
After years of disappointing trial and error, a vaccine shows success in a clinical trial in preventing the transmission of HIV/AIDS. Granted, the trial shows a less than one-third success rate. Compared to the 85 percent success rate of the new H1N1 swine flu vaccine, that's quite low. Yet it clearly is the most promising success to date , and we can only hope that it soon leads to a workable vaccine that that immunizes against the HIV/AIDS virus.
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When the patient safety field began a decade ago with the publication of the IOM report on medical errors, one of its first thrusts was to import lessons from “safer” industries, particularly aviation. Most of these lessons – a focus on bad systems more than bad people, the importance of teamwork, the use of checklists, the value of simulation training – have served us well.
But one lesson from aviation has proved to be wrong, and we are continuing to suffer from this medical error. It was an unquestioning embrace of using incident reporting (IR) systems to learn about mistakes and near misses.
We love hearing stories about how Lumosity has improved our users’ cognitive abilities and changed their lives. If you have a Lumosity story to share, submit it here: http://www.lumosity.com/testimonials.
Here’s an example of a touching testimonial that we recently received from Dr. David Darbro. Dr. Darbro suffered from a stroke in 2005, and he now uses Lumosity to regain lost mental function.
“Imagine not being able to speak … you are driving home one night when suddenly out of the blue your speech becomes gibberish….then imagine what it would be like to not be able to remember what number comes after 1,2,3,4,…. That description describes what I experienced in 2005. A week or so after I went into atrial fibrillation I had a stroke that hospitalized me.
Dr. Lumpkin serves as director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Health Group, where he is responsible for planning and program management. Prior to joining RWJ, Dr. Lumpkin led the Illinois Department of Public Health for 12 years. As assistant vice president, Downs plays a leading role on the Foundation's Pioneer Portfolio team. During his tenure at the Foundation he has created, developed, or overseen the Foundation’s investments in such key initiatives as Project HealthDesign, InformationLinks, the Health e-Technologies Initiative, the Public Health Informatics Institute, Connecting for Health, and Common Ground. His writings may be found at Pioneering Ideas, where this post first appeared.
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