Sleep Apnea for Health Care Professionals
Review of Sleep Apnea for Medical Health Professions, Continuing Medical Education. Screening, Diagnosis, Treatment, consequences of disease if not treated.

By: Expert Sleep Medicine

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Sleep Apnea for Health Care Professionals - Video

Health Focus: Software application improves health service delivery
If you are a patient, you definitely want to be cared for not only by your family and friends but by your medical professionals. However the relationship with the health care professionals...

By: NTV Uganda

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Health Focus: Software application improves health service delivery - Video

Cupping therapy @ nadipathy Kakinada
NADIPATHY Treatment Acupressure Health Care Centre Ramanayya Pet - Kakinada E.G.DT - Andhra Pradesh, INDIA. For more details visit: http://www.nadipathy.in email: nadipathy@gmail.com, ...

By: Ancient Nadipathy

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Cupping therapy @ nadipathy Kakinada - Video

FH Celebration Health Annual Report 2014
Florida Hospital provides excellent health care in partnerships with generous people like you. Your Generosity Heals.

By: Florida Hospital Foundation

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FH Celebration Health Annual Report 2014 - Video

20150308-Z-WT236 003 - MED-1 mobile hospital part1
Personnel operating Carolinas Med-1 mobile hospital, provide simulated medical care to individuals with injuries caused by a hurricane during a Vigilant Guard exercise in Georgetown, S.C.,...

By: S.C. Air National Guard

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20150308-Z-WT236 003 - MED-1 mobile hospital part1 - Video

Thousands of Teachers Lobby at the Capitol
Texas AFT Lobby Day and Rally 2015. Teachers and school employees gathered at the state Capitol to lobby on issues such as Community Schools, fully funding public education, affordable health...

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President Obamas health-care law will cost taxpayers substantially less than previously estimated, congressional budget officials said Monday, in an upbeat note for a program that has faced withering criticism since its passage five years ago.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office attributed the savings to spending on medical care in coming years that will not be as great as previously forecast. As a result, the agency said, insurers are not expected to charge Americans as much for coverage, and the government will save on subsidies for low- and moderate-income people.

Whats more, the CBO has concluded that companies are not canceling health insurance policies as often as had been anticipated earlier this year. Fewer Americans consequently are planning to sign up for insurance under the Affordable Care Act, generating more taxpayer savings.

In total, the health-care law will cost taxpayers $142 billion, or 11 percent, less over the next decade than estimated in January. The cost of providing subsidies for people to buy insurance on the state and federal marketplaces the centerpiece of the law will be 20 percent lower than projected.

The savings are a positive development for a program that has been battered by bad news, from the botched rollout of the main enrollment Web site in 2013 to a legal challenge before the Supreme Court last week.

Theres certainly a lot of rhetoric by the laws opponents that costs are going to explode, that costs are out of control, that Obamacare had no cost containment in it, said John Holahan, an economist at the Urban Institute. I cant see how people can continue to say those things.

The report is one of a growing number of assessments of the laws impact on the nations economy, budget outlook and health insurance market long-debated topics since before its passage in March 2010.

On Monday, Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell announced that as of Feb. 22, nearly 11.7million people across the country had signed up for or reenrolled in health insurance through the state and federal marketplaces.

Last week, Gallup reported that the share of Americans without insurance coverage continued the slide that began after the law went into effect, with 12.3percent of the population uninsured at the end of February.

A role in slower spending?

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Health-care law will cost taxpayers less than expected, CBO says

Just as the launch of Apple's iPod and iTunes proved to be the tipping point in digital music, some are speculating that Apple's new platform for medical researchers and its Apple Watch,could do the same for digital, data-driven health care.

"They've got the size, the influence, and they're integrating across consumer digital health to medicine," said Paul Sonnier, a digital health advocate and consultant. "It's all about ecosystem building and bringing in the right partners."

Read MoreHow many 'life-saving' watches will Apple sell?

Apple announced Monday a new open-source platform called ResearchKit to help health researchers enlist and monitor research subjects through Apple devices.

"This is a new era," said Yvonne Chan, director of personalized medicine and digital health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. "This is really, truly revolutionizing the way clinical research could be done in the future."

Mount Sinai Hospital is one of five medical facilities that will conduct clinical trials using ResearchKit.

Read MoreApple must think beyond the watch

Mount Sinai researchers plan to use their Asthma Mobile Health study app to recruit a large number of asthma patients, who will then use the app to track their day-to-day symptoms and habits. The hope is that the real-time tracking will help the researchers and the patients understand what triggers attacks, and document what practices can maintain better health.

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Apple's ResearchKit: Health care's tipping point?

Political leaders challenged to attend meeting, provide answers

Guardian photo by Steve Sharratt

Souris Mayor David MacDonald

SOURIS Politicians of almost every stripe have been invited to attend a public meeting in Souris Tuesday night intent on improving health-care services for eastern P.E.I.

You could say our confidence is rather low since our message for better health care here has failed to gain any attention, says Alan MacPhee, eastern chair of Islandwide Hospital Access.

The goal of the group is to inform the public as a means of forming good public policy.

Thats why the group is hosting a public meeting at 7 p.m. tonight at the Souris regional high school and is taking the pre-election opportunity of inviting all the politicians. A distributed flyer says the group has invited all Liberal, PC and NDP leaders and candidates.

We have been poorly treated by Health P.E.I. and we are tired of it, said Souris Mayor David MacDonald. We need solid ambulance service as a start point to give rural communities some equity in the delivery of health services.

Health P.E.I. contends it is managing limited resources, but Islandwide Hospital Access says the problem is in the allocation of those resources. The group says Souris needs four doctors and is expected to be reduced to only two.

Health budgets have more than doubled, yet rural services have been cut, said MacPhee. This is the core of what we are calling rural discrimination. The problem is not the amount of money ... its the mismanagement of money.

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Health care meeting tonight in Souris

This week is Patient Safety Awareness Week, and its time to recognize the secret sauce for any successful effort to improve health care quality: transparency. Thats something both sides of the aisle should be able to get behind.

We have a long way to go. Choosing a doctor or hospital is one of lifes most important decisions, but you will likely find more detail about the quality of, say, toasters on the market than you will about health care providers. That is not an accident. The idea that health care should be transparent is a fledgling movement, with some powerful opponents. Health industry lobbyists are collectively among the most well-funded interest groups in Washington, and they have succeeded in slowing the pace of change.

But they havent stalled it completely, thanks to the determination of coalitions of consumer and business advocates, as well as some enlightened health care providers and policymakers. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in particular has taken unprecedented steps to use its leverage to create a culture of transparent public reporting. Through all its efforts, more and more quality and safety data are reaching the light of day. And thats good news for consumers.

Progress In The Private Sector United in their common goal of driving transparency in the health care sector, a multitude of organizations have already pointed the direction for transparency initiatives. They have assembled data into useful and engaging online tools to help consumers make informed decisions and have pointed out data that is missing but desperately needed by consumers. A new independent study in Health Affairs analyzed the four most prominent and widely-used tools to rate hospitals: the Hospital Safety Score, U.S. News & World Report, Consumer Reports and HealthGrades. The authors found that each of these tools considers different aspects of hospital performance, and each one reaches different conclusions as a result. Some tools look at mortality rate for certain surgical procedures, some consider readmission rates, and some look at a mix of management practices and patient outcomes for particular conditions or procedures. (In full disclosure, one of the tools analyzed, the Hospital Safety Score, is a letter grade issued to hospitals by my nonprofit, The Leapfrog Group, and is focused exclusively on errors, injuries, accidents and infections.)

Based on the findings, one of the studys authors, Dr. Robert Wachter, a prominent patient safety guru (and volunteer expert at my organization) from the University of California, San Francisco, suggests consumers consult more than one rating when making decisions about hospitals. This is sound advice. Hospitals are complex places, and a hospital may have a world-class cardiac unit but a mediocre obstetrics program. Even hospitals with uniformly great surgeons might have a high rate of errors and infections. And just as consumers weigh such factors as airbag placement, console design, and gas mileage when purchasing a car, health care consumers should consider as much information as possible when choosing where to receive care.

Missing and Hidden Data So what information should patients have access to when making these crucial decisions?

Business advocates and consumers have a long wish list of data that is largely hidden from public reporting. In addition to more nuanced and comprehensive data on hospital safety, here are a few items consumers should be able to easily access online but cannot:

Some of this data is shielded from public view by law. Some is shielded by standard practice. And some is not collected because scientists havent put the resources into figuring out how to measure it.

But change isnt just on the horizon anymoreits here. Dr. Wachter is leading the charge for more openness among his colleagues. He recently co-chaired a multi-stakeholder roundtable at the respected Lucian Leape Institute of the National Patient Safety Foundation, which issued an exceptionally bold call to action on transparency last month. The report said health cares culture of secrecy needs to change, and it made a series of recommendations for far greater transparency among doctors and nurses, between health organizations, and with patients and the public. This report should be a playbook for the new Congress; transparency is a cause that cuts across partisan lines.

This Patient Safety Awareness Week, lets be more than aware lets be vocal about the change wed like to see. Consumers entrust their lives to the health care industry. The stakes couldnt be higher for our families, and we are entitled to know how the system really works.

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Time For Bipartisan Action On Health Care Transparency

We spend more on our health care as we age. No news there. But you may be surprised to learn that all health spending is not created equal. For most of us, as long as we can stay out of the hospital or a nursing home, our costs are relatively modestand steadyeven as we grow older.

But that can change if we have a severe, acute medical episode that lands us in a hospital bed or a skilled nursing facility, or if our functional or cognitive limitations get so severe that we need home health care or even must move to a nursing home. While we use those services infrequently, we are more likely to do so as we age. Because they are extremely expensive and often not paid for by Medicare, our out-of-pocket costs for those services can go through the roof.

According to a new study by Sudipto Banerjee at the Employee Benefit Research Institute, out-of-pocket spending for routine (he calls it recurring) care changes very little after age 65. Even at age 85 and older,our spending for visits to doctors or the dentistor even for medicationremains pretty constant. In part, that may be because Medicare pays a big chunk of the costs for many of these services, including medications, though the program does require co-pays and deductibles (and, in the case of drugs, has the famous donut hole).

Banerjee did find a big gap between what a typical senior spends on drugs compared toout-of-pocket costs for a handful of the biggest users. For instance, an average spender aged 65-74 can expect to pay about $1,900 for medications over a two-year period (Note the study looks over two years, not annually). But the top ten percent of spenders will pay $4,800 for their meds.

However, even among those high users there is little change in costs as people age. In other words, if you were a big spender at 85, you were probably also a high-cost user at 65.

The story is very different, however, when it comes to less frequent but very expensive medical care or long-term supports and services. Banerjees data comes from the Health and Retirement Study, a comprehensive national survey of people 50 and older.

As we age, we are far more likely to use these costly services. For instance, about 27 percent of those 65-74 had an overnight hospital stay during the period 2010-2012, while more than 42 percent of those 85 and older spent at least one night in a hospital. Similarly, less than 4 percent of younger seniors spent a night in a skilled nursing facility but nearly one-quarter of those 85 or older did so.

Interestingly, a separate study by Tricia Neuman and colleagues at the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that per-person Medicare spending increases with age until people reach very old age, when it begins to steadily decline. This suggests that the very old choose to use fewer in-patient services or other costly forms of treatment.

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How We Spend Our Health Care Dollars As We Age