Surviving Modern Healthcare: 9 Tips To Keep Your Network Strong from Nurse TogetherWe have heard it said that “no man is an island,” and that is true for all of us. An effective support system is necessary for us to excel in our life goals. These support systems may include friends, family, loved ones and co-workers. I had the opportunity to hear a wonderful speaker who grew up with parents who were FBI agents. He changed his identity and moved several times as he was growing up, and he spoke of one of the most important lessons he learned from his parents: your network keeps you safe. He then went on to do an insightful presentation about the value of networking. Some of the most important networks which we find ourselves a part of are our social networks, family networks and professional networks. Social networks include our friends, those we meet in classroom settings, people we like to spend time with and those we engage in social media. Our family network includes all of our family members and extended family. Lastly, our professional network includes colleagues at work. Even more valuable though, is the professional network you build beyond your work experience. Especially with the volatility in healthcare, the professional network can be vital to your career success. Your professional network can serve you in three important ways: support, promotion and saving your life.

We have heard it said that “no man is an island,” and that is true for all of us. An effective support system is necessary for us to excel in our life goals. These support systems may include friends, family, loved ones and co-workers. I had the opportunity to hear a wonderful speaker who grew up with parents who were FBI agents. He changed his identity and moved several times as he was growing up, and he spoke of one of the most important lessons he learned from his parents: your network keeps you safe. He then went on to do an insightful presentation about the value of networking.

Some of the most important networks which we find ourselves a part of are our social networks, family networks and professional networks. Social networks include our friends, those we meet in classroom settings, people we like to spend time with and those we engage in social media. Our family network includes all of our family members and extended family. Lastly, our professional network includes colleagues at work. Even more valuable though, is the professional network you build beyond your work experience. Especially with the volatility in healthcare, the professional network can be vital to your career success. Your professional network can serve you in three important ways: support, promotion and saving your life.

For the full article please go here.

Boldly Going Where No Capsule Has Gone Before from H and HN

OK, so many of my get-rich-quick schemes haven't been what you would call blockbusters. My closest friends, family and even financial adviser scoffed several years ago when I came up with the idea for a new delicacy: Tuna on a Stick. Go ahead, laugh, but have you ever been to the Taste of Chicago? They sell everything on a stick at that exhibition of gluttony, so why not tuna? I had a grand vision of franchising all over Chicago, eventually expanding the menu to mackerel, red snapper, even Mahi Mahi (wouldn't you know it, a few years later when the Minnesota Twins' new ballpark Target Field opened, the concession stands boasted "Walleye Skewer" and "Pork Chop on a Stick").

More recently, I had the idea of creating a giant wiper blade that could descend from the top of a skyscraper to swoosh away the rain. Attach a hose or some sort of spraying mechanism and it also negates the need to have workers dangle hundreds of feet above the sidewalk with sponges and squeegees.

For the full article please go here.

5 reasons EHRs need to 'grow up' from HealthCareITNews.com

With Medicare's push toward shared savings and accountable care organizations, healthcare business models are getting more complex, said Shahid Shah, software IT analyst and author of the blog The Healthcare IT Guy. And according to him, the industry needs software to implement these new models.

“Due to the new intricacies of organizational connections between different providers, standardization of workflows on existing EHRs won’t really be possible," Shah says. "Most EHRs are not up to the task of handling the complexities of newly shared accountability and what I call ‘patient team’ business models, so we need EHRs to become more social, more collaborative, and far more integrated than they are now, EHRs need to grow up from the adolescence of basic electronic typewriters and chart storage systems to mature real-time care coordination and collaboration platforms.”

Shah gives us five more reasons EHRs need to “grow up.”

For the full article please go here.

Ohio first state to use Direct messaging across state lines from HealthIT.com

COLUMBUS, OH – Ohio is the first state in the nation to successfully send and receive health information across state lines, using Direct secure messaging, through its statewide health information exchange, CliniSync, according to the Ohio Health Information Partnership (OHIP). The OHIP, a Medicity client, is the state-designated HIE for Ohio.

Medicity announced Friday that it has helped OHIP to conduct live messages between one physician's office in Lima, Ohio and another in Biloxi, Miss. Mississippi's state-designated HIE, the Mississippi Health Information Network (MS-HIN), is also a Medicity client. The partnership also performed live instances of Direct messaging within the state of Ohio.

For the full article please go here.

In Third-Degree Burn Treatment, Hydrogel Helps Grow New, Scar-Free Skin from Science Daily

ScienceDaily (Dec. 13, 2011) — Johns Hopkins researchers have developed a jelly-like material and wound treatment method that, in early experiments on skin damaged by severe burns, appeared to regenerate healthy, scar-free tissue.

In the Dec. 12-16 online Early Edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers reported their promising results from mouse tissue tests. The new treatment has not yet been tested on human patients. But the researchers say the procedure, which promotes the formation of new blood vessels and skin, including hair follicles, could lead to greatly improved healing for injured soldiers, home fire victims and other people with third-degree burns.

For the full article please go here.

Big providers compare notes on product usage from HealthIT.com

ST. LOUIS, MO – The Healthcare Transformation Group (HTG), a collaborative of Geisinger Health System, Intermountain Healthcare, Kaiser Permanente, Mayo Clinic and Mercy, is seeking to spur efficiency and safety by performing data analysis to determine specific product lines the group has in common.

Earlier this year, the HTG hosted a summit with its top 20 suppliers to discuss how to move the healthcare industry forward with GS1 Standards adoption. Each supplier shared their plans and timeline toward adoption, and asked what product lines or manufacturing divisions they should focus on first in the adoption of standards in healthcare. 


For the full article please go here.

How 10 million dollars can spark Health Care innovations from CNN

Dr. Peter Diamandis wants you to be the CEO of your own health care.

You should be able to make decisions based on technology that analyzes your body and gives you personalized feedback and treatment recommendations, he says. And Diamandis wants to speed the development of that technology along by offering prizes for the people who can make it happen.

Diamandis is the founder and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, which offers $10 million prizes for various technological feats.

In October, he announced the $10 million Archon Genomics X PRIZE presented by Medco, which is a challenge to sequence 100 genomes of centenarians quickly, cheaply and accurately.

Such sequencing is getting more accurate and inexpensive all the time. And data collected from sequencing specific groups of people – those who have had specific diseases, for instance – will help scientists gain a better understanding of those conditions and how to treat them.

For the full article please go here.

New Way To Defeat Drug-Resistant Superbugs: Renew Their Susceptibility To Antibiotics from Medical News Today

How do you defeat an opponent who has acquired an effective new defence mechanism? Either develop a more powerful weapon, or find a way to undermine his clever new defence device. In the war against superbugs, this is the equivalent of either developing new drugs, or make them susceptible again to existing drugs. Well, now scientists have discovered a way to do this for drug-resistant bacteria that have acquired an ingenious defence mechanism: efflux pumps. These pumps enable the bugs to expel antibiotic drugs from their bodies; that is until a team of chemists from Brown University comes along and blocks their pumps, making them vulnerable again to antibiotics.

Dr Jason K. Sello, assistant professor of chemistry at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island in the US, and colleagues, write about how they synthesized a new compound called BU-005 and used it to block efflux pumps that bacteria use to expel an antibacterial agent called chloramphenicol, in the 15 December issue of Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry.

Sitting in the cell walls or membranes of bacteria, efflux pumps are proteins that spot and expel drugs that breach those membranes. In some cases, the pumps have become so advanced they can recognize and expel drugs with totally different structures and mechanisms.

For the full article please go here.

6 most in-demand skills for HIT professionals in 2012 from HealthIT news

The demand for capable IT specialists is growing, and according to Guillermo Moreno, vice president of recruiting firm Experis Healthcare, certain skills are bound to take the spotlight come 2012.

“This is an area that’s of interest and concern, given what we’re seeing in the marketplace,” Moreno said. “With the continuation of the build of the information technology movement in healthcare, we are seeing some sizable fractures in the healthcare space around human capital and human talent.”

With the New Year around the corner, we asked Moreno to look ahead and share with us the top six most in-demand skills for healthcare IT professionals in 2012.

1. ICD-10/5010 expertise. Moreno said with the movement to reach the audit function and compliance right in front of us, the demand in the market place for professionals is at an all-time high. “More and more organizations are beginning to road map themselves in ICD-10 migration,” he said. “Everyone understands what ICD-9 is and what it means to generically migrate to ICD-10, but there are few who have actually made the transition or are in the process of doing so.” Moreno said he’s seeing requests and demands both on the payer and provider side, as well as large government organizations looking for skilled professionals. This includes those with expertise in project management, program management, and coding. “Those are the three pretty major areas for people who understand ICD-10, and frankly, in this country, there isn’t a lot of experience in that space.”

For the full article please go here.

6 states to participate in tech retreats for health insurance exchanges from HealthCareIT

WASHINGTON – The National Governors Association (NGA) on Wednesday named six states selected to participate in NGA retreats to help the states technically prepare for health insurance exchanges.

According to NGA, the retreats are customized to address each state’s unique circumstances. The states selected to participate are Alabama, Illinois, Kentucky, Nevada, Utah and Washington.

States have just a short time left to make many decisions about establishing the health insurance exchanges mandated by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Regardless of whether a state is considering a state-based exchange, a federal exchange or a partnership, a wide range of cross-agency planning and discussion must take place to meet the 2013 deadline established by the ACA, say NGA officials.

For the full article please go here.

9 ways advances in technology are changing Health Care: from HealthIT.com

MCLEAN, VA – As healthcare moves into a new era of efficiency, effectiveness and improved patient outcomes through health information technology, consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton has identified the top nine ways health IT is transforming healthcare. Among the changes with the greatest impact are reduced medical errors and faster emergency care.

"Good healthcare is no longer about just good doctors and good hospitals; it's about connectivity, it's about data, it's about information, it's about speed to treatment and health IT enables each of those," said Robert M. Pearl, MD, the executive director and CEO of The Permanente Medical Group.

For the full article please go here.

Erasing Signs of Aging in Human Cells Now a Reality from Science Daily

ScienceDaily (Nov. 3, 2011) — Scientists have recently succeeded in rejuvenating cells from elderly donors (aged over 100). These old cells were reprogrammed in vitro to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) and to rejuvenated and human embryonic stem cells (hESC): cells of all types can again be differentiated after this genuine "rejuvenation" therapy. The results represent significant progress for research into iPSC cells and a further step forwards for regenerative medicine.

Inserm's AVENIR "Genomic plasticity and aging" team, directed by Jean-Marc Lemaitre, Inserm researcher at the Functional Genomics Institute (Inserm/CNRS/Université de Montpellier 1 and 2) performed the research. The results were published in Genes & Development on November 1, 2011.

For the full article please go here.

4 Secrets to Never Getting Sick from Health.com

Kick the cold

By Jeannette Moninger
From Health magazine

Ever wonder why you always seem to come down with a life-interrupting virus this time of year, while other women you know sail through the season sniffle-, cough-, and ache-free?

We canvassed the research and talked to top experts to uncover these key, study-backed secrets for staying well, even when you're surrounded by germs. The docs' number one tip: Get the flu vaccine, ASAP. Then, follow these simple steps to boost your virus protection even more.

For the full article please go here.

$6.8 Billion Spent Yearly On 12 Unnecessary Tests And Treatments from Kaiser Health News

By Michelle Andrews

Oct 31, 2011

For many adults, a routine visit to a primary care physician might involve blood tests, a urinalysis, an electrocardiogram, maybe a bone density scan. Too often, however, these tests are inappropriate and they cost a bundle, according to a recent study, not only for the health care system but also for individuals, who are increasingly footing more of the bill for their care.

The study, led by physicians from the Mount Sinai Medical Center and the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, was published online in October in the Archives of Internal Medicine. The researchers examined the cost of common primary care practices that were identified as being overused earlier this year in a study by another group of physicians, known as the Good Stewardship Working Group.

For the full article please go here.

Top 5 IT rules for smaller practices from Healthcare IT News

Although so many health IT-related discussions tend to focus on large organizations across the country, it's important to remember the smaller practices whose needs differ. In fact, implementing new technologies into a smaller practice can be tricky, depending on the amount of data you have and your willingness to pick up on current IT trends.

We asked Shahid Shah, software IT analyst and author of the blog The Healthcare IT Guy, for his thoughts on outfitting these small practices with the right health IT. He says some legwork is needed to ensure proper selection, and making sure new technology truly streamlines work in a smaller practice is essential.

Check out Shah’s five IT rules for smaller practices:

For the full article please go here.