Monday, March 3rd, 2008
At a House Small Business Committee hearing on Tuesday, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) and Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D) discussed strategies proposed in their states that are intended to lower health care costs and expand coverage, CQ HealthBeat reports.
Pawlenty discussed several proposed pay-for-performance initiatives, including offering incentives to providers ...
Posted in Health Insurance | No Comments »
Monday, March 3rd, 2008
Heath inequities between rich and poor, as well as between different racial and ethnic groups, shrank in the U.S. from 1966 to 1980, then widened from 1980 to 2002, as measured in rates death in the young and in infants. This was reported in a study recently published in PLoS ...
Posted in Public Health | No Comments »
Thursday, February 28th, 2008
GE Healthcare IT announced that many of its Centricity(R) solutions, including Centricity Health Information Exchange (HIE) Services, passed important integration profiles established by Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE). The IHE testing process is a critical step in achieving systems interoperability to enhance the quality of patient care. Many of these ...
Posted in IT / Internet / E-mail | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
Who benefits from antidepressants?
A new study published today in PLoS Medicine suggests that antidepressants only benefit some, very severely depressed patients.
"New generation" antidepressants, such as fluoxetine (Prozac) are widely prescribed for the treatment of clinical depression. However some studies have suggested that these drugs do not help the majority of ...
Posted in Depression | No Comments »
Monday, February 25th, 2008
Patients who prefer to be highly involved in their treatment don't necessarily have better luck managing chronic health conditions, a new study suggests.
A research team based at the Veterans Affairs (VA) Iowa City Health Care System and the University of Iowa surveyed 189 veterans with high blood pressure to determine ...
Posted in Psychology / Psychiatry | No Comments »
Saturday, February 23rd, 2008
Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Health Net, alleging that the health insurer sold individual policies to consumers with the intention of dropping coverage if they needed costly treatment, the Los Angeles Times reports. According to the lawsuit, the company defrauded thousands of policyholders ...
Posted in Health Insurance | No Comments »
Saturday, February 23rd, 2008
CMS has ordered California-based health insurer Health Net to stop marketing and enrollment for its "Health Net Orange" Medicare prescription drug plans, according to a notice on a government Web site, Florida Health News reports. The freeze was enacted because the company failed to process enrollment applications on time and ...
Posted in Health Insurance | No Comments »
Saturday, February 23rd, 2008
Google and the Cleveland Clinic have partnered to launch a pilot program that will begin to store online the personal health records of patients, a "long-awaited health service that's likely to raise more concerns about the volume of sensitive information entrusted" to Google, the AP/Austin American-Statesman reports. The program will ...
Posted in IT / Internet / E-mail | No Comments »
Saturday, February 23rd, 2008
Spanish-language television commercials for foods and beverages with little nutritional value might be contributing to obesity rates among Hispanic children in the U.S., according to a study published online Tuesday by the Journal of Pediatrics, Reuters reports. Nearly half of all food commercials the study examined advertised fast food, and ...
Posted in Obesity / Weight Loss | No Comments »
