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Yesterday, the New York Times published an intriguing story about “Cadillac” (that is, expensive) health insurance plans,
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I have done several posts on the Robo Docs and heres one from CNN showing the military using them as well for remote support and healthcare. This hospital in Orange County was accredited to handle stroke victims due to their use of the Robotic Doctor.
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The move to support single payer system is still alive and well. The comments on the video are interesting and perhaps some could be a little more cautious before throwing stones. Healthcare reform is on the minds of everyone today and you cant ignore the fact that bankruptcies and debt are continuing to rise. The system we have now is broke and hopefully reform will come, but to have that happen, we certainly could use a little less stone throwing as this is a team effort with all needing to come to the table. BD
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Want to join the conversation about medical issues in the United States? Best way to do that is to stay connected.
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Some of the incentives for participation include premium reductions, cash and bonuses, health-account contributions and gift cards as well as asking 
employees to fill out a health risk assessment and the problems lie with retention as drop out rates are high. Health-Net is turning a new program lose on their own employees. Ingenix (the statistical wholly owned subsidiary of United HealthCare) said it has developed a data analysis tool that helps companies more effectively communicate with employees in a way that motivates them to improve their lifestyles, but would not disclose its methods, so here we go once more, no transparency, but just trust me. UnitedHealthCare or one of their subsidiaries keeps showing up with ties into so many different financial sectors of healthcare and just bought out another similar firm like Ingenix in Tennessee.
26
On a related note, the main ingredient for the vaccine comes from a chicken egg and October is seen as the target month to begin having the 
vaccine available, so now with the lab test being available treatments for those diagnosed can be started quickly too. We are not done with the flu yet it appears as just last week in the UK, 100,000 cases were detected, July 2009.
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The proceedings at the first meeting of the benignly titled Association of Clinical Researchers and Educators (ACRE) was chronicled on the Carlat Psychiatry Blog here, and on Postscript, the Prescription Project blog here. ACRE, founded by Dr Thomas Stossel (see relevant post here on the sorts of arguments Dr Stossel has made), was founded to defend academics who are paid on the side by drug, biotechnology, and device companies from the complaints of the “pharmascolds.” What I found most troubling was that the conference was officially opened by Dr Jeffrey Flier, the Dean of the Harvard medical school, implying a medical school endorsement of this group, and featured presentations by the presidents of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, and the American Society of Hypertension, implying endorsement by these medical societies. But also see the comments by Dr Howard Brody on the Hooked: Ethics, Medicine and Pharma blog that there may be a silver lining to this cloud. Read the rest of this entry »
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Back when the stock market crashed, everyone thought it was odd that a few days afterwards that Microsoft and others were pushing high powered servers, and at the time I knew exactly why as they needed speed for the rebuild. Those algorithms were needed to run faster than ever to make the 
money back the banks had received and pay back the government. Morgan Stanley was one of those who was all over it. Again, this may sound out of sorts for non geeks, but to the finance folks it made perfect sense for planning for the next moves with financial business intelligence.
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This week, a Washington Post article discussed who provides the data being cited in the ongoing US debate about health care reform.
Read the rest of this entry »
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I post about home monitoring devices that are being used to help with seniors, well now the cats and dogs have it too, so you can monitor everyone in the same household, and see if that dog or cat is really doing what they should be doing. On second thought, combine this with a home monitoring device for grandma or grandpa and you can see the interaction with our cuddly friends too, so if you need the entire picture here or are doing a study on how pets help us out, heres the ticket. BD