HEALTH-CARE SUMMIT – Innovative strategies and systemic interventions to improve health-care in S… – Video

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HEALTH-CARE SUMMIT - Innovative strategies and systemic interventions to improve health-care in S...
The University of Stellenbosch Business School (USB), in partnership with the Impumelelo Social Innovations Centre, has great pleasure in inviting you to a H...

By: Bellville Park Campus, University of Stellenbosch

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HEALTH-CARE SUMMIT - Innovative strategies and systemic interventions to improve health-care in S... - Video

National Center’s Dr. David Hogberg’s Senate Testimony on Government-Run Health Care Problems – Video

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National Center #39;s Dr. David Hogberg #39;s Senate Testimony on Government-Run Health Care Problems
Dr. David Hogberg #39;s testimony on foreign problems with government-run health care and the political problems that face patients under those systems given bef...

By: SunnyDayAmerica

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National Center's Dr. David Hogberg's Senate Testimony on Government-Run Health Care Problems - Video

Health Care Law Helps Entrepreneurs Quit Their Day Jobs

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hide captionThe Affordable Care Act could encourage people to start new businesses by solving an age-old problem: job lock.

The Affordable Care Act could encourage people to start new businesses by solving an age-old problem: job lock.

The Affordable Care Act which many see creating challenges for businesses could benefit a particular group of business people: entrepreneurs.

Joshua Simonson was reluctant to give up his job at a Portland, Ore., area grocery store, New Seasons Market, which he says had provided excellent health care for him and his family. He had a pre-existing condition that has prevented him from getting insurance in the private market, but one key development helped convince him to quit and start a farm.

"One of the biggest factors was the Affordable Care Act," Simonson says, "that our family would be able to be covered by health care starting the beginning of 2014."

Now, the young entrepreneur runs a 26-acre farm near Sheridan, Ore., where chickens till through the flower beds and goats graze on the lawn. He has 3,000 egg-laying hens, whose eggs he and his partner will sell in the Portland metropolitan area. Soon, they'll add pigs and raise chickens for meat.

It had been hard to leave a job that provided health care, especially since he had trouble getting coverage in the past.

"I was ineligible for any health care. I'd been denied by five different companies because I have back problems," says Simonson, who's broken three vertebrae in his back. "Nobody wanted to cover me because of that."

Economists call what held Simonson back job lock, or entrepreneur lock.

"Entrepreneur lock has proven to be a significant barrier to potential entrepreneurs," says Dane Stangler, vice president of research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation, which promotes entrepreneurship.

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Health Care Law Helps Entrepreneurs Quit Their Day Jobs

U.S. Health Care System Has $5.6 Billion Security Problem

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Health-care organizations are under attack.

Criminals are stealing patient records to commit medical identity theft. And the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has made the situation worse, according to a new report from privacy and information security research firm Ponemon Institute.

Ponemon estimates that these breaches cost the industry about $5.6 billion a year.

The survey found the overall number of reported data breaches at health-care organizations declined slightly last year, but criminal attacks on health-care providers increased dramatically up 100 percent since 2010.

This is Ponemon's fourth annual Patient Privacy and Data Security study, and it finds that most data breaches are caused by sloppy practices, such as lost laptops loaded with unencrypted patient data.

"The information that's contained in a medical record has real value in the hands of a cyber criminal," said Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute. "And there's evidence that suggests that in the world of black market information, a medical record is considered more valuable than everything else."

"The people in the health-care industry are good people who sometimes do stupid things, and that is the source of a lot of the problems."

"The black market is being flooded with payment card data," said Rick Kam, founder and president of ID Experts, which sponsored the study. "That data expires rather quickly because financial institutions replace the cards. Your Social Security number and personal health record don't change. They have a long shelf life."

Other key threats include employee negligence, unsecured mobile devices and third-party contractors who have access to the sensitive patient information of the health-care organizations they work with.

Good people doing stupid things

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U.S. Health Care System Has $5.6 Billion Security Problem

Criminal attacks on US health care soar

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Health-care organizations are under attack.

Criminals are stealing patient records in order to commit medical identity theft. And the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has made the situation worse, according to a new report from the Ponemon Institute.

Ponemon estimates that these breaches cost the industry about $5.6 billion a year.

The survey found the overall number of reported data breaches at health-care organizations declined slightly last year, but criminal attacks on health-care providers increased dramaticallyup 100 percent since 2010.

This is Ponemon's fourth annual Patient Privacy and Data Security study, and it finds that most data breaches are caused by sloppy practices, such as lost laptops loaded with unencrypted patient data.

"The information that's contained in a medical record has real value in the hands of a cyber criminal," said Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute. "And there's evidence that suggests that in the world of black market information, a medical record is considered more valuable than everything else."

"The black market is being flooded with payment card data," said Rick Kam, founder and president of ID Experts, which sponsored the study. "That data expires rather quickly because financial institutions replace the cards. Your Social Security number and personal health record don't change. They have a long shelf life."

(Read more: More winter woes: Utility-bill scams pile up)

Other key threats include employee negligence, unsecured mobile devices and third-party contractors who have access to the sensitive patient information of the health-care organizations they work with.

"The people in the health-care industry are good people who sometimes do stupid things, and that is the source of a lot of the problems," Ponemon said. "They're trying to get their work done, they feel under pressure, they're in the business of caring for patients, and they don't want to waste time to do more security or take that extra step to protect privacy."

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Criminal attacks on US health care soar

Vermont has new plan to slow health care costs

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By WILSON RING/Associated Press/March 12, 2014

MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) More than 2,500 health care providers that serve Vermonters could be working together to help control costs by focusing on keeping people healthy rather than being paid to treat patients when they are sick, Gov. Peter Shumlin and other top officials said Wednesday.

The two new shared savings programs offered through health insurance plans offered by Vermont Health Connect and the states Medicaid program are designed to move away from the traditional fee-for-service model of health care to encourage providers to work together, keep people healthier and as a result reduce the growth of health care costs.

Shumlin said the three-year-program getting underway in Vermont is the first such statewide program in the country.

Right now we have a health care system that most folks agree is not sustainable. Its not sustainable because costs are rising faster than Vermonters incomes, Shumlin said at a Montpelier news conference at the headquarters of the Green Mountain Care Board, which is overseeing the overhaul of Vermonts health care system.

If left unchecked, if we continue to do business as we always have it will continue to consume too much income of middle class Vermonters who are struggling enough, of small businesses and large businesses, of all of us together, he said.

The goal of the programs is to encourage health care providers to keep patients healthy rather than provide expensive, sometimes unneeded tests, officials said.

As an example Al Gobeille, chair of the Green Mountain Care Board, said that if a hospital expected to spend $25 million to care for a group of patients and they provided that care for $22 million, the providers would be able to share in the savings if they meet certain requirements.

They've saved money from what we thought they would spend and they get part of it back to invest in their practice, Gobeille said.

One of the programs will be offered through health insurance programs offered by Vermont Health Connect, the state website that provides access to insurance as part of the federal health overhaul efforts, and Vermonts Medicaid program, which provides health insurance to low income and disabled Vermont.

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Vermont has new plan to slow health care costs

Genetic markers provide primate link in human evolution

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12 March 2014

Genetic markers provide unprecedented primate link in human evolution

Genetics provide stunning new answers to the question of human evolution, according to Auckland cancer researcher, Dr Graeme Finlay.

Genetic markers that are used to follow the development of populations of cells have exactly the same character as those that track the development of species, says Dr Finlay who has just published a book on genetics and human evolution.

His book, Human Evolution: Genes, Genealogies and Phylogenies, was published by Cambridge University Press late last year.

Dr Finlay is senior lecturer in Scientific Pathology at the Department of Molecular Medicine and Pathology, and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Auckland Cancer Society Research Centre, in the University of Auckland.

Controversy over human evolution remains widespread, but the human genome project and genetic sequencing of many other species has provided myriad precise and unambiguous genetic markers that establish our evolutionary relationships with other mammals, says Dr Finlay.

This book identifies and explains these identifiable, rare and complex markers including endogenous retroviruses, genome-modifying transposable elements, gene-disabling mutations, segmental duplications and gene-enabling mutations.

These new genetic tools also provide fascinating insights into when and how many features of human biology arose: from aspects of placental structure, vitamin C dependence and trichromatic vision, to tendencies to gout, cardiovascular disease and cancer.

The book brings together a decade's worth of research and ties it together to provide an overwhelming argument for the mammalian ancestry of the human species.

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Genetic markers provide primate link in human evolution

Whole-Genome Scans Not Quite Ready for Widespread Use: Study

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By Amy Norton HealthDay Reporter Latest Prevention & Wellness News

TUESDAY, March 11, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- Commercially available tests can analyze your genetic profile and try to predict your risk of a host of diseases. But a new study suggests they aren't ready for prime time.

The technology, known as whole-genome sequencing, allows scientists to "map" the information encoded in most of the billions of building blocks that make up a person's DNA.

So far, whole-genome sequencing has been used mainly in research. But the hope is that the technology will help fuel a new era of "personalized medicine" -- where doctors will be able to identify patients with gene variants that raise their risk of certain diseases.

In the past few years, the cost of whole-genome sequencing has fallen to the point where it could soon be feasible to use it in everyday health care, said Dr. Frederick Dewey, of Stanford University, the lead researcher on the new study.

But based on his team's findings, Dewey said, a lot more work is needed before that idea becomes reality.

The study, reported in the March 12 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that sequencing a whole genome remains a fairly daunting task.

And although the commercially available tests are good, they aren't yet reliable enough for routine patient care, Dewey said.

For the study, Dewey's team recruited 12 healthy adults who volunteered a blood sample for whole-genome sequencing.

Overall, testing showed that each patient had between 2 million and 3 million unique variations in their DNA. The researchers then used a software program they had developed to whittle down that sea of information to around 100 genetic variations per person that were deemed worthy of more investigation.

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Whole-Genome Scans Not Quite Ready for Widespread Use: Study

Putting patients first

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Published: Wednesday, March 12, 2014, 9:00p.m. Updated 7 hours ago

Individualized treatments tailored to patients' particular genetic makeups is the future of health care. That's what personalized medicine means. Extraordinary advances in biopharmaceutical research will result in a doubling of the market for personalized medicines by 2019, to more than $18 billion. Nearly half the prescription compounds currently in development are individualized therapies.

Targeted treatments save lives, minimize side effects, prevent illnesses and more effectively and efficiently restore health to the sick. But these exciting developments are threatened by recent policy efforts to contain short-term health care costs that sacrifice long-term individual patient outcomes.

Researchers understand the potential of personalized medicine. A recent report from the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development found that 94 percent of biopharmaceutical companies are developing personalized medicines. Between 2006 and 2010, their investments in this area increased by 75 percent.

Today, cutting-edge treatments are helping patients fight cancer, diabetes and heart ailments. Scientists have discovered the genetic links behind more than 50 hereditary cancer syndromes. For America's 1.2 million HIV/AIDS patients, new capabilities allow doctors to customize drug cocktails based on the patient's biological characteristics, eliminating many side effects and greatly improving quality of life.

Personalized medicine has been especially effective in treating so-called orphan diseases, rare illnesses that each afflict fewer than 200,000 Americans. But, as a whole, the nearly 7,000 orphans take a significant toll on our country's health.

Unfortunately, Uncle Sam has launched an initiative that could undermine the potential of individualized medicine for decades to come. In the name of cutting costs, the federal government is funding comparative effectiveness research studies to calculate the average impact of different therapies across broad swathes of the population. By de-personalizing medicine and endorsing limited treatment options, the rationale goes, policymakers can cut expenses across the system as a whole.

The problem, of course, is that what works for the average patient isn't always the best course of treatment for any given individual.

The pressure on physicians to make their prescription selections based predominantly on comparative effectiveness research is mounting fast. Proponents have even suggested that recommended drugs be reimbursed at higher rates, while newer, more personalized medicines get short shrift.

Tinkering with the reimbursement system would likely create a conflict of interest for doctors. Ignoring the best interest of the patients, physicians would have a strong incentive to prescribe the medications that win the bureaucrats' seal of approval. This approach will have a chilling effect on innovation, as researchers realize they may have little hope of seeing a return on their intellectual investment.

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Putting patients first