Oct 9, 2015, 1:38 PM, Posted by
Susan Dentzer
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Aug 10, 2015, 3:25 PM, Posted by
Susan Dentzer
Brownsville, Texas, had plenty to celebrate when it became one of six communities to win the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Culture of Health Prize in June 2014. This predominantly Hispanic city along the U.S.-Mexico border is one of the poorest in the country. Seven in 10 residents are uninsured, 8 in 10 are overweight or obese, and 1 in 3 has diabetes. Yet the community’s efforts to improve health—including new bike trails, community gardens, and a successful bilingual public health education campaign—have earned it wide respect and national recognition, along with $25,000 that goes with the RWJF Culture of Health Prize.
City officials are still discussing how to use the prize money. One option is commissioning a piece of artwork that could be moved around to highlight various initiatives, such as the periodic CycloBia events that make some of the city’s streets car-free for a day so that residents can bike, run, or engage in other physical activity.
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Aug 3, 2015, 1:57 PM, Posted by
Susan Dentzer
In this era of value-based payment, we need to consider how different players within health care approach the value equation.
How would you judge the value of your health care? A longstanding definition of treatment holds that value is the health outcomes achieved for the dollars spent. Yet behind that seemingly simple formula lies much complexity.
Think about it: Calculating outcomes and costs for treating a short-term acute condition, such as a child’s strep throat, may be easy. But it’s far harder to pinpoint value in a long-term serious illness such as advanced cancer, in which both both the outcomes and costs of treating a given individual—let alone a population with a particular cancer—may be unknown for years. And then there’s the complicating issue of our individual preferences, since one person’s definition of a good outcome—say, another few years of life—may differ from another’s, who may be seeking a total cure.
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Jun 1, 2015, 11:46 AM, Posted by
Susan Dentzer
How a section of Birmingham, Alabama is redeveloping and offering greater opportunities for people at multiple income levels. The secret? Engaging the community throughout the process.
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May 4, 2015, 10:01 AM, Posted by
Susan Dentzer
It’s a memory aid. It’s truth serum. Using it can transform relationships forever. These may sound like come-ons for the type of product typically hawked on late-night television. But in fact, they’re some of the things people are saying about OpenNotes.
OpenNotes isn’t a product, but an idea: That the notes doctors and other clinicians write about visits with patients should be available to the patients themselves. Although federal law gives patients that right, longstanding medical practice has been to reserve those visit notes for clinicians’ eyes only.
But Tom Delbanco and Jan Walker, a physician and nurse at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, have long seen things differently. Their personal experiences with patients, and inability to access care records for their own family members, persuaded them that the traditional practice of “closed” visit notes had to change. So, with primary support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, they launched what has now become a movement.
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Mar 4, 2015, 11:16 AM, Posted by
Susan Dentzer
Washington, D.C.’s Shaw neighborhood is named after Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who commanded the famed 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the all-black regiment that fought for the Union during the Civil War. Today, the multi-ethnic neighborhood is home to the U Street Corridor, a revived commercial district known in the early 1900s as “Black Broadway"; Ben’s Chili Bowl, a celebrated city landmark; and Seaton Elementary, a public school whose students are mainly Hispanic, African-American, and Asian.
It’s also home to the young goalie of Seaton’s soccer team, sixth grader Kevin Alvarez.
Like many kids in his neighborhood, Kevin, age 13, never played sports until recently, and was seriously overweight. Then his school was fortunate to become home to Soccer for Success®, a program managed locally by DC SCORES, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit.
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Feb 19, 2015, 2:21 PM, Posted by
Susan Dentzer
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Jan 30, 2015, 5:47 PM, Posted by
Susan Dentzer
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Jan 16, 2015, 1:25 PM, Posted by
Susan Dentzer
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Jan 7, 2015, 1:48 PM, Posted by
Susan Dentzer
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