Less is More but Zero is Best When it Comes to Preventable Injuries

Judy Salerno It’s been about 12 years since the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released its landmark report To Err is Human, shining a light on how commonly medical errors occur in our health care system. The report concluded that as many as 98,000 people die in hospitals each year as a result of such errors. […]

Springtime In Vermont: Health Policy Is Blooming!

Mike Magee It’s springtime in Vermont. And when it comes to health policy, we haven’t seen this much action since Howard Dean MD was governor.Let’s begin with Governor Pete Shumlin’s signing of a bill today to establish a single-payer plan for the state’s 620,000 residents.(1) Physician leader Deb Richter believes that a little over half […]

mHealth: Who’s Paying, How, and Why?

Mike Magee What will drive health care’s immediate future? In 3 words – Complexity, Connectivity, Consumerism. To be more specific, consumer choice will foster creation and purchase of products that enhance connectivity with the goal of managing multi-generational complexity.(1) We are a mobile society with a high disease burden and an inefficient, inconvenient and expensive […]

State of The World’s Mothers Report: A “Save The Children” Study Released

Save the Children’s State of the World’s Mothers Report freflects on the United States investment of one half of 1 percent of the federal budget fighting global poverty. Explore the report’s rankings of the world’s best and worst places to be a mother and essays by prominent contributors for yourself.

GE Healthcare On The Move: New App Visualizes US Health Status Variability

App Demo John Dineen, president and CEO of GE Healthcare believes, “Variance is evil. It is bad for your health, it is bad for your local doctor’s business, and it is bad for the U.S. health care system….[T]he fundamental driver of cost and quality problems in healthcare is the inconsistency of delivery and outcomes region-to-region, […]

Indoor Tanning Is Carcinogenic

Becky Wiley, The Skin Cancer Foundation The misconception that there is no scientific basis for banning indoor tanning needs to be dispelled. Recent studies provide evidence linking indoor tanning bed use to melanoma and reinforce the declaration by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) that indoor tanning devices are carcinogenic to humans. A press […]

5 Things We Need To Know About Serotonin

Mike Magee What do you really know about serotonin? Probably about as much as I do – neurotransmitter, implicated in depression, one of the S’s in SSRI’s, featured blobettes in the classic Zoloft animated commercial.(1) What else? Lack of it is no cause for personal shame and can be treated, but treating it (especially in the […]