Diet and Nutrition. Natural Health, and Healthy Living

The Massachusetts health reform law Part II, enacted in 2008 - laid the groundwork for cost control and quality improvement, as a follow-on to the initial legislation's emphasis on achieving near-universal coverage. The legislation authorized several studies -- including a report published a few months back on global payment strategies -- and set the stage for hearings on health care cost containment to be held before the state Division of Health Care Finance and Policy (DHCFP), which are scheduled to begin March 16, 2010.

(more...)

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.
(more...)

Todd Park is definitely one of health care IT’s good guys. Todd was the brains (but not the mouth!) behind athenahealth. Since he left athenahealth, he spent a year back in California doing angel investing (Ventana among others) and being a dad. But despite his desire to stay on the west coast, he was dragged intothe vortex known as Washington DC, and for the last 5 months he’s been the (first) CTO of HHS. (BTW he cashed out his investments, and politely turned down my proposal to “care for” his cash while he was being a public servant!)

(more...)

Gilles Frydman is one of the leading ePatients. He started and runs ACOR (Association of Cancer Online Resources) and has discussed the role of engaged patients with rare diseases at the last few Health 2.0 Conferences. We'll be hearing more from Gilles in the US this year, but first we're inviting him to present at Health 2.0 Europe. His twitter name (@kosherfrog) reveals Gilles’ ethnic and national background, so we thought he was a very appropriate person to discuss both the future of online patient activism, and the Health 2.0 scene in the US and Europe.

(more...)

We are deeply grateful for the multitude of people who have contacted us wanting to provide medical assistance. As patients flood to our sites from Port-au-Prince, we're finding ourselves in need of both medical personnel and supplies. In particular, we need surgeons (especially trauma/orthopedic surgeons), ER doctors and nurses, and full surgical teams (including anesthesiologists, scrub and post-op nurses, and nurse anesthetists).

(more...)

for Women Under 50" title="The Cost of Mammography Screening
for Women Under 50" />

The tempest that greeted the United States Preventive Services Task Force guidelines on mammography screening for women in their 40s prompted the Senate to insert a mandate in its health care reform bill that every insurer cover every mammography screening test at no cost to beneficiaries. If it passes, it will spark an upsurge in mammography screening, especially among women under 50, and raise the nation's health care tab.

(more...)

Late last year PR/Communications giant Edelman released a survey called the Health Engagement Pulse.(Here’s the press release and here are the charts) This is separate from both Edelman’s Engagement Barometer which has looked at consumer engagement and trust in business and institutions for years, and their Health Engagement Barometer (HEB) which looked at engagement in health in five countries in 2008 and is going to be run again this spring.At Health 2.0 we;ve worked with Edelman and featured the HEB data in our meetings and will continue to do so.Recently I “chatted” with Edelman’s President for Health, Nancy Turret, to find out what she thinks the data is telling us about people’s attitudes towards “health”.

(more...)

Is there anyone left, on either side of the political spectrum, who wants the Senate health care bill to pass?

Republican Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour had this to say about the Senate bill last week, “This health care plan is like mackerel in the moonlight. Longer that it's out there, the more that it stinks.”

And yesterday, MoveOn said this about the Senate Democratic health care bill in an email to its members, "America needs real health care reform—not a massive giveaway to the insurance companies. Senator Bernie Sanders and other progressives should block this bill until it's fixed."

(more...)

From a deeply depressing survey of the unemployed in today’s NY Times:

Nearly half of respondents said they did not have health insurance, with the vast majority citing job loss as a reason, a notable finding given the tug of war in Congress over a health care overhaul. The poll offered a glimpse of the potential ripple effect of having no coverage. More than half characterized the cost of basic medical care as a hardship.

(more...)

As many involved in the worlds of Health 2.0 and Information Therapy know, some of the most interesting experiments in the world of patient-physician engagement have been happening in the somewhat unlikely environs ofsmall townOklahoma. There the City of Duncan has put its employees (and their providers) into a system that incents (but doesn’t mandate)physicians to practice according to accepted guidelines, and incents (but doesn’t mandate) patients to read information prescribed by their physicians about their treatments (and tests them about it). The system then asks each party to rate the other.

(more...)