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American Health Worker With Ebola Heading to U.S. for Treatment

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TIME Health ebola American Health Worker With Ebola Heading to U.S. for Treatment National Institute of Health The National Institute of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Md. A health care worker with Ebola is headed to Maryland for treatment.

An American health care worker who was infected with Ebola while working in Sierra Leone is heading home to the U.S. for treatment.

The patient is being flown from Sierra Leone to a specialized treatment unit at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. The staff is expecting to admit the patient on Friday.

MORE: TIME Person of the Year: Ebola Fighters

This is not the first patient with Ebola the NIH has treated during the recent outbreak. The staff also treated Nina Pham, one of the infected Dallas nurses who treated the first person diagnosed with Ebola in the United States, Thomas Eric Duncan. The NIH unit is one of only a handful in the U.S. designed to treat serious communicable diseases like Ebola. You can see a video of the unit here.

NIH is taking every precaution to ensure the safety of our patients, NIH staff, and the public, the NIH said in a statement.

Sierra Leone, where the American volunteer was working, is the West African country hardest hit by Ebola. Despite overall declines in Ebola cases in West Africa, the country had a small outbreak of the disease in February among a local community of fishermen, and has reported 11,677 cases to date. On Thursday, the World Health Organization released new numbers showing Ebola deaths have topped 10,000 and the number of cases in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea has reached 24,350.

Though the region has experienced some good news, with Liberia releasing its last patient with confirmed Ebola in March, groups like Doctors Without Borders have warned the international community against getting complacent, telling TIME more coordinated contact tracing and surveillance is still needed.

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American Health Worker With Ebola Heading to U.S. for Treatment

SAMHSA’s Suicide Prevention App, Suicide Safe, for Health Care Providers – Video

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SAMHSA #39;s Suicide Prevention App, Suicide Safe, for Health Care Providers
Suicide Safe by SAMHSA helps providers integrate suicide prevention strategies into their practice and address suicide risk among their patients. This free app is based on SAMHSA #39;s Suicide...

By: SAMHSA

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SAMHSA's Suicide Prevention App, Suicide Safe, for Health Care Providers - Video

Health care tops among Scottsdale employers

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Scottsdale Lincoln Health Network is the citys largest employer with more than 6,000 workers in three traditional hospitals, an urgent-care facility, a surgery hospital and doctors offices. About one in five Scottsdale workers is employed in either health care or hospitality.(Photo: Nick Oza/The Republic)

Roughly one in five people employed in Scottsdale works in either health care or hospitality, and those industries accounted for half of the city's 10 largest employers in 2014, according to government data.

With the city's three major hospitals and a vast array of posh resorts, it's no surprise that Scottsdale's economy draws so heavily from the two sectors, accounting for nearly 30,000 jobs.

The city's largest employer, Scottsdale Lincoln Health Network, has more than 6,000 workers in Scottsdale, spread across three traditional hospitals, an urgent-care facility, a surgery hospital and doctors' offices.

The company, formerly Scottsdale Healthcare, maintains more than 800 hospital beds at Osborn Medical Center downtown, Shea Medical Center closer to the airpark and Thompson Peak Hospital north of Loop 101.

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Health care tops among Scottsdale employers

You Are Now Free to Move About the Clinic

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Health care providers have learned several lessons from the airline industry such as crew resource management, and checklists. That being said, one area in which we do not often seek guidance from those who fly the friendly skies is customer satisfaction. Why not? In the 2014 American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), airlines were ranked only slightly higher than the following perennial crowd pleasers: subscription television providers and local and federal governments.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that the health care industry is not actively seeking the advice of these colleagues, they do share eerily comparable approaches. A new realization of these similarities came to me a few years back, while watching a documentary on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Following a discussion about the new carbon fiber fuselage and other improvements, the scene shifted to the cabin where Blake Emery, Boeing Boeings Chief Differentiation Officer, was leading a reporter on a tour. I listened as he discussed the end-to-end flying experience.

He talked about how people were often anxious and rushed in transit to the airport, and how parking was frequently a hassle at best. He then discussed the other impediments involved in making it from the airport front door to your seat on the plane (confusing signage, security lines, etc.). Lastly, he admitted that once you arrived, the cabin environment was typically anything but inviting.

My mind raced this was the health care experience, just in a different setting. Over the next few days, I kept thinking about the concept, and came up with many more parallels. As it turns out, the experience of flying and seeing a health care provider are incredibly (and regrettably) similar environmentally, and existentially.

Airport gates are virtually identical to clinic and hospital waiting rooms with chairs created by a famous French designer (the Marquis de Sade) and situated to maximize capacity and minimize privacy. The gate desk mirrors the clinic desk in appearance and function a person gives you a number and asks you to sit and wait, and then informs you that the flight/doctor is running late, or sorry, I cant change your reservation/appointment. This person controls your access to the expert behind the door the pilot or the doctor.

Once past the desk, you are likely to be even more apprehensive after all, you have now lost all control over your immediate future, and have placed yourself completely in the hands of the expert. And you may well sit on the tarmac/in the empty exam room for a while before takeoff.

I contacted Blake Emery, and arranged a visit. He was kind enough to both show me a mockup of the Dreamliner cabin, and compare notes. We had to make a decision whether to maximally engage the flyer in the experience of flying, or to maximally distract them, he said. Do you figure out a way to recapture the enjoyment of flying, or put some sort of virtual reality hood on everyones head as soon as they board the plane?

He described how they had used a combination of two techniques Idealized Design as well as a method for understanding the Cultural Archetype that consumers have for flying. I was familiar with Russell Ackoffs Idealized Design concept, but not the latter.

He explained, We worked with Clotaire Rapaille the founder of a technique of extracting the formative impact that products or experiences have had on people, often at a young age. Rapaille calls these cultural archetypes, or hidden codes.

Some archetypal experiences are good, and some are not. The thing is that if the common archetype is negative for your product or service, you need to somehow offset that if its positive, you need to capitalize on it.

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You Are Now Free to Move About the Clinic

Health-Care Deductibles Climbing Out of Reach

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Deductibles are an element of any insurance product, but as deductibles have grown in recent years, a surprising percentage of people with private insurance, andespecially those with lower and moderate incomes, simply do not have the resources to pay their deductibles and will either have to put off care or incur medical debt.

The chart above, based on a Kaiser Family Foundation studypublished Wednesday, shows that about a quarter of all non-elderly Americans with private insurance coverage do not have sufficient liquid assets to pay even a mid-range deductible, which at todays rates would be $1,200 for single coverage and $2,400 for family coverage. We found that more than a third dont have the resources to pay higher deductibles. Among low- and moderate-income households, even fewer are able to meet deductibles. Its no wonder that collections for medical debt represent half of all bill collections. The estimates are conservative because they assume that people have all of their liquid assets available to pay their health-care bills. But most people must tap into their liquid assets to meet other obligations, such as their rent or mortgage, car repairs, or educational costs.

No doubt this growth in cost sharing has played a role in the moderation seen in the rate of increase in health spending and will continue to, as cost sharing motivates people to think twice about the health care they use. The debate is whether high deductibles are good or bad for peoples health care. A crude summary of a lot of research is that it depends. High deductibles may be okay for people who are generally healthy and have the resources to pay their cost sharing when they need to. But big deductibles can also be a real barrier to needed care for people with moderate or lower incomes who are sick.

Certain factors can help mitigate the impact of deductibles. Not everybody needs health care in a given year, or they use very little, so they dont have to pay down their deductibles every year. About one in five workersis in a high-deductible plan that can be paired with tax-preferred savings accounts that can build up when he or she doesnt use care. Deductibles may provide a sensible incentive for people to be prudent consumers of health care. But with so many people with private coverage lacking the funds to meet growing cost-sharing obligations, they can pose a serious financial burden and sometimes be a barrier to care for many, especially lower- and moderate-wage workers.

Drew Altman is president and chief executive officer of theKaiser Family Foundation. He is on Twitter:@drewaltman.

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Health-Care Deductibles Climbing Out of Reach

Health care worker tests positive for Ebola

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Story highlights Spokesperson: Experts are investigating how the UK military health care worker got Ebola It is being decided if the military worker infected in Sierra Leone will return to England There have been some 24,000 reported cases and 10,000 deaths in the latest Ebola outbreak

Medical experts are assessing what to do next, including whether or not the evacuate the infected individual to the United Kingdom for treatment, according to a Public Health England spokesperson.

An Ebola outbreak has devastated parts of West Africa, with Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia being the hardest hit nations. The vast majority of the more than 24,000 confirmed, reportable and suspected cases, as well as the nearly 10,000 reported deaths, have been in those three countries, the World Health Organization reports.

In some cases, citizens of other nations have come down with the deadly disease while working there -- as, apparently, is true for the UK military heath care worker whose diagnosis was announced Wednesday.

Authorities are investigating how this person was exposed to the virus and tracing individuals in recent contact with the diagnosed worker, said the Public Health England spokesperson.

"Any individuals identified as having had close contact will be assessed and a clinical decision made regarding bringing them to the UK," the spokesperson said.

Pauline Cafferkey, the first person diagnosed with Ebola in the United Kingdom, was discharged from London's Royal Free Hospital in January after battling the virus.

She is a public health nurse in Scotland's South Lanarkshire area who was part of a 30-strong team of medical volunteers deployed to West Africa by the UK government last month in a joint endeavor with Save the Children, according to British media outlets.

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Health care worker tests positive for Ebola

Health Focus: Software application improves health service delivery – Video

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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


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