The Barter Economy

PSFK:

A medical center in Maine, USA, has commenced a program aimed to provide medical care to uninsured patients. The Portland Hour Exchange Program is designed as a complement to Medicaid, and the initiative lets patients pay for medical services with ‘time dollars’, which they can earn through completing chores. Instead of paying an expensive fee or contributing to their insurance plan, low-income patients enrolled in the program can do various odd jobs for the practitioner, ranging from mowing the lawns to doing cleaning. Two hours of chores gives uninsured patients access to one visit to a doctor.

Magic.

John Scully speaks:

The big difference now is that if you look at the social web, the consumer is no longer wowed by technology. It’s all about magic, and the magic can be Facebook, Twitter, the ability to find anything anywhere on Google. We’re at an era where technology is an invisible enabler to magic. So the real quest is if we can take the challenge of getting healthy people to focus on lifestyles that will keep them healthy and make it feel like a magical experience, and that’s why gamification is probably a piece of the solution. (Fast Company)

“You Have To Tell A Story, Before You Can Sell A Story”

Designing a Smarter Patient

On: Benchmarking

Seth:

If you’re going to count on the competition to bring out your best work, you’ve surrendered control over your most important asset. Real achievement comes from racing ahead when no one else sees a path–and holding back when the rush isn’t going where you want to go.

It’s foolish (usually).

More and more, hospitals are embracing the mental and physical benefits of song

jayparkinsonmd:

Food stamps are now worth double at farmer’s markets in Michigan. Lovely. Congrats to the Fair Food Network for spearheading a pilot in Detroit, successfully executing, and then expanding the program to the entire state. That’s hard work, especially politically hard work.

Brilliant.

The Prostate Czech.

via Faris

MobiHealthNews thinks the number of consumer iPhone health apps will number 13,000 in 2012. That’s a lot. But we still await a platform to tie everything together.

Social good is not a world owned by saints and martyrs, nor is it defined by the scale of the problem you’re hoping to solve. Social good is everybody’s, and it happens each time we do something a little better, a little greener, and a little more considerately than the people before us.

Carmel Hagen.

Word.