Month: December 2010

The branding here is clever. But in all practicality–this would save risk managers a lot of heartburn when it comes to HIPAA compliance issues…

Big Think:

The pipe dream of the paperless office has been around for a while, hoping to mitigate the massive paper waste generated by the corporate world – 1,410 unnecessary pages printed by the average employee every year, to be precise. Now, the WWF is tackling the problem with the most ingenious solution yet: A file format.

The new .wwf format is essentially a PDF that cannot be printed. The free installer is currently only available for Mac OS, but a PC version is coming soon. And even though the format has only been around for four days, three large international companies have already adopted it.

We must stop running from fixing primary care

A Minnesota 2020 study “Best Practices: Minnesota’s Highest Value Hospitals” concludes:

  • While this report concludes that higher spending does not necessarily correlate with better quality, it shows that increasing the primary care labor corresponds to higher value and quality of care.
  • By taking a holistic approach to medicine, where primary care doctors encourage healthy habits, manage chronic conditions, and provide routine check-ups and immunizations, costs can be better controlled.
  • The American Academy of Family Physicians estimates that adding one primary care doctor for every 20,000 people decreases the number of unexpected premature deaths by 9 percent.
  • 98 percent of medical school students plan to seek careers in fields other than primary care because of the extra administrative duties, lower salary and exorbitant administrative duties.
  • The U.S. health care system will be short 40,000 primary care doctors by 2020.
  • In general, hospitals that have low proportions of Medicare reimbursements to amounts of uncompensated care, education costs and cost-of-living expenses, perform more favorably in the value ranking, while hospitals that have higher proportions of primary care/family physicians compared to specialists fair better in the quality ranking.

Health as a status symbol…

…may be the best thing that’s ever happened to the concept of health.

As good health is now as important to some consumers as having the biggest, newest or shiniest status symbols, growing numbers of consumers will expect health products and services in 2011 to prevent misery if not improve their quality of life, rather than merely treating illnesses and ailments. 

Wellthy, one of trendwatching’s 11 Crucial Consumer Trends of 2011