chronic disease

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On Wednesday May 1st, Nicole Ghanie-Opondo (@todayisbanana) moderated our tweetchat and asked the community how social media can serve behaviour change messages and help track diseases. As an introduction to the discussion she wrote an article in her blog – Behaviour Change, Disease Tracking & Social Media?[read more]

I recently came across a news story about a British legislator who proposed that patients suffering from life style illnesses, medical problems mainly due to behavioral choices such as being overweight, ought to have to pay for their own medicines rather than having them provided for free by the National Health Service.[read more]

Dr. Stephen Schimpff

Last week, we spoke with Daniel Wolfson who talked about the Choosing Wisely Campaign and how it raises quality of care by promoting doctor/patient dialogue about testing and screening. Today, one of our distinguished Advisory Board members, Dr. Stephen Schimpff, gives us his ideas on how we can curb healthcare costs while maintaining quality by better managing chronic disease.[read more]

Dr. Jennifer Dyer (Endogoddess)

 

Last week, we met with Casey Quinlan who advocated asking the question, "How Much Is That?" in order to promote cost transparency in healthcare. This week, we visit with Dr. Jennifer Dyer in Columbus, Ohio. Jen is a pediatric endocrinologist and entrepreneur. Her mobile app, EndoGoal has just been released.[read more]

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Diabetes is a serious medical condition that is affecting more and more Americans. The latest estimates show that over 100 million of us – nearly one in three – have diabetes or prediabetes. When diabetic patients don’t control their disease, it can lead to complications like blindness, kidney failure and the need for limb amputation. However, these things are all preventable when patients take care of themselves.[read more]

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PFCD strongly believes that one critical area for research characterized by both substantial needs and opportunities is how to enhance care for the millions of people coping with multiple chronic conditions within a medical system geared almost entirely around individual diseases.[read more]

By highlighting successful and scalable programs like the Diabetes Prevention Program, I was able to emphasize the value of implementing programs that we know are already making progress towards better health outcomes. As the Partnership for Chronic Disease (PFCD) has long professed, leadership from both government and the private sector is essential to all efforts aimed at averting, detecting and effectively managing chronic disease.[read more]

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Last Friday, the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease (PFCD), in collaboration with WellPoint, proudly participated in the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s 2012 Health Braintrust, an in-depth discussion on effective programs and approaches for addressing health inequities that contribute to the disproportionate impact chronic disease has on communities of color.[read more]

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Kaiser Permanente credits its success to leveraging electronic medical records to identify patients at risk, better coordinating their care, and improving self-management[read more]

One of the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease’s main tenants is to promote a collective focus on investing in and promoting ways to both better tackle the incidence of chronic disease and reduce health care spending. We’ve recently seen that collective focus generate some basic changes in the doctor-patient relationship, namely a heavier concentration of discussions based around prevention and wellness during routine visits.[read more]

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...ten percent of the Medicaid population accounted for a whopping 68 percent of total spending. And the impact of chronic conditions with this group? Significant. In the top one percent of spenders alone, more than 80 percent of beneficiaries suffered from three or more chronic conditions.[read more]

Blend Images/shutterstock

Medicaid is missing out on a significant opportunity to improve health and lower costs, according to a new study. Looking at Medicaid enrollees with conditions that can lead to heart disease, researchers found the number who failed to take their medicines is on the rise, according to a new study described in U.S. News and World Report and published in the Journal of Urban Health.[read more]