Pundits and political scientists will be analyzing the 2012 elections for some time to come.  On the health care front, though, I think it’s not too early to say that President Obama’s re-election could be termed the Great Reconciling.  As a nation, we seem to have come to terms with the immediate future of health policymaking and this, in turn, opens the door to give greater attention to a number of large issues that warrant national attention. (more…)

Earlier this year, Disruptive Women in Health Care launched a partnership with the EPA where we will be examining issues of health and the environment as they relate to women and children. The primary focus of this partnership will be a series of ebooks that looks at topics where women’s health and the environment intersect, and these will be accompanied by special events co-hosted by Disruptive Women and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. (more…)

This year, the organizers of BlogHer’12 added a first ever full day of Health to their agenda, lovingly referred to as HealthMinder Day. I was very honored to have been invited to serve on one of those health panels:  How Online Community Can Improve Offline Health.  Now, over a week later, I’m still kvelling.

The experience exceeded my expectations.  Not only did I get to visit my hometown of NY (always a plus to be back in the Big Apple), I also had the opportunity to do what I love – talk about Disruptive Women in Health Care, meet other amazing women and share ideas. (more…)

Summer is in full swing (if you haven’t already noticed) – the days of relaxation and spending time with friends/family are upon us. But that doesn’t mean the learning has to go on hiatus! Next month, health professionals from all over the country will descend upon Atlanta, Georgia for the 6th National Health Communications, Marketing and Media conference. (more…)

Matthew Zachary

This month we are extremely excited to have Matthew Zachary as our Man of the Month! Matthew is the CEO/Founder of Stupid Cancer – an organization focused on empowering young people who have cancer. He is the face of the next generation leader for meaningful, community driven health innovation.

We caught up with Matthew to get some additional insight on his background and Stupid Cancer.

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By Carrie Winans. If you went to the doctor and found out you were at risk for osteoporosis, you would probably start taking steps to prevent it under your doctor’s supervision.  So why is it that when doctors diagnose patients as pre-diabetic – patients with blood glucose levels that are higher than normal but not high enough to be classified as diabetes – it so often goes untreated while there is still time to take action?

On June 14^th, the Diabetes Prevention Summit in Washington, DC highlighted this problem and many others.  One of the most interesting things the conference emphasized was the breaking down of stereotypes about type 2, or adult-onset, diabetes. This disease presents itself by insulin resistance or inability to respond properly to insulin.  Resistance develops due to genetics, obesity, increasing age, race, family history, and high blood sugar. Mass media often tries to paint those with diabetes 2 under a broad paint stroke, highlighting their weight and as the sole reason behind the condition.  However, it is important to note that not all overweight people have diabetes 2 nor are all people with diabetes 2 overweight.

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As the Supreme Court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act approaches, we asked our readers to weigh in on what they think is going to happen. Turns out you have a lot to say! Here are a few of the great comments we got on Facebook.

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By Andre Blackman. Remember when we said that you shouldn’t miss 2012 DC Health Data + Innovation Week? Well, we weren’t playing around! The past several days at the “epicenter of health innovation” as our friend Ted Eytan would put it, will go down in the history books. With data scientists, health/medical professionals and technologists literally coming from different parts of the globe to tackle health innovation, the movement began to feel even more real.

Kicking off the week was the Health 2.0 Code-A-Thon at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Total Health, which brought together coders to make an impact in the fight against obesity in the country. With great discussions led by local visionaries including Alisa Hughley of enBloom Media, the teams got to work to build meaningful platforms to address issues around food and physical activity. The best thing about the code-a-thon event is that something is actually built and ready to be used right afterward! Here’s some thoughts on the weekend from the Center for Total Health’s blog:

While the judging was close, the Healthy Plate team came in second (for a prize of $3,000), and the School Fit team took top honors—and $4,000—for its app that addressed the childhood obesity epidemic by building transparency.  School Fit’s app combined ranking school fitness levels with location information, really targeting the issue of obesity via civic, educational, social and family connections.  Check out photos from the two-day event here, and for a thoughtful perspective on the Code-a-Thon process, take a look at these two blog posts from Ted Eytan, MD.  Alex Howard Storified the weekend, too—you can see a social media snapshot of the event right here.

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As RWJF marks its 40^th year as a national philanthropy, they will share the milestone with up to 10 young leaders, 40 years of age and under, who are already leaders in improving the health and health care of our nation.

The Foundation could easily just celebrate their achievements of the past 40 years but instead, they believe in passing it forward– to help advance the next generation who are working tirelessly to improve the health and health care of all Americans.

The Foundation’s Young Leader Awards: Recognizing Leadership for a Healthier America will provide $40,000 each to up to 10 individuals. Awardees may use the award to advance their innovative work, though this is not a requirement.  The criteria for selection seek out innovative leaders who have collaborated to meet important health and health care needs through new approaches and those who have applied learning beyond the boundaries of a single discipline.

Third-party only nominations for the Young Leader Awards will be accepted between May 31, 2012, and July 16, 2012. Award winners will be announced at an October 25/26, 2012 conference held at the Foundation in Princeton, NJ.

By Carrie Winans. May 13-May 19 is National Women’s Health Week!  This week has been set aside by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Women’s Health in order to draw special attention to the unique health issues facing women every day.  The week serves as a reminder to schedule regular appointments such as physicals, dental check-ups and OBGYN visits.  It also encourages women to take a fresh start to summer and pledge to get active and change their diet to include the healthy vegetables of the season.

One of the most important things about National Women’s Health Week is the strong emphasis on preventive screenings.  A preventive screening helps separate healthy individuals from persons who may have an undiagnosed condition.  Commonly, tests like mammograms and pap smears come to mind as preventive measures for women.

However, there is another type of preventive screening that women should pay attention to this National Women’s Health Week.  Women should get screened for osteoporosis.  Osteoporosis is the loss of calcium and decrease in overall bone mass.  As a result of this decrease, bones become fragile and break much more easily.  It occurs most often in older women after menopause.  While osteoporosis affects both men and women, women are five times as likely to develop the condition.

The National Bone Health Alliance (NBHA) has made a special effort to increase osteoporosis awareness through their 2Million2Many campaign. The basis of the campaign lies in this fact:  Each year, there are 2 million bone breaks that are no accident, but signs of osteoporosis. Each year, a third of patients with a hip fracture had a prior fracture. After fractures, four out of five women will never be tested for osteoporosis. Osteoporosis fractures will likely cost Americans $25 billion by 2025.

As part of their efforts and in honor of National Women’s Health Week, NBHA hosted a summit yesterday at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Total Health. Moderated by former Congresswoman, tireless health care advocate, and Disruptive Woman Nancy Johnson and the director of NBH David B. Lee, the summit brought new information to the health world.  The summit focused on the specific human and economic impacts of osteoporosis and the NBHA’s plan to reduce bone breaks 20% by the year 2020.  This “20/20 Vision” initiative would implement secondary fracture prevention initiatives throughout the nation. (more…)

By Andre Blackman. Achievements over the past several years have moved the needle across a variety of industries. Technology, business, communication, media and a host of others. One area which has been recently getting alot of attention is health care. This attention is being focused on subjects like the treatment and prevention of diseases, the broken structure of the health care system in the United States, the role of patients in the system and taking it to a macro level view – what’s happening around the globe when it comes to health and well being.

Change is here and it’s brewing vigorously.

However, the circle of people who are plugged into these innovations – these changes for impact – are still relatively small. Public health/health care haven’t traditionally been intensely exciting topics. Usually stories of communities dying from a particular disease or suffering from a societal norm that gives an unfair advantage, are covered in the news and even the textbooks. To be fair – those issues are very real but the fantastic part is that there are individuals, organizations and projects that are proliferating wildly across the globe to actually change them. For that very reason, we’ve created the FastForwardHealthFilmproject. (more…)

Governments and their development partners have struggled to address this problem. Many have tried mandating new graduates to provide a few years of service in underserved areas. These programs have met with variable success depending on the governments’ commitment and ability to enforce the plan. Since the publication of the World Health Organization’s well-thought out and evidence-based guidelines on increasing access to health workers in rural areas, some health systems are implementing mid- and long-term solutions such as recruiting and training health workers in underserved communities.

But governments are under intense pressure to solve the problem now. Some have tried rural retention schemes but many of these have been too expensive to maintain long term or scale up to the entire country. For example, Zambia has a rural retention program for physicians, but the program is funded by an external donor (not sustainable) and the salaries are significantly out of proportion with the salaries of other health workers as well as per capita income in the country. These programs also tend to be more expensive than necessary because ministries of health tend to design them without involving the workers in the rural areas that they want to retain or even workers in metropolitan areas that they want to post to underserved areas. The plans have no foundation in evidence. (more…)

By Lois Privor-Dumm. Without money, many nations can’t afford to tackle health care issues and introduce the life-saving vaccines that are critical to child survival in the developing world.  But even after a vaccine is introduced and money has been spent, some children never see even the first dose.  With so much investment and effort, you wonder — how can that be?

Take Nigeria, the country with the second largest number of child deaths globally.  Over the past few years, they’ve raised vaccine coverage in many parts of the country to nearly 70%.  But progress is fragile, and results uneven.  Some areas have coverage rates above 80%; others are barely providing any vaccine.  Economic status and presence or absence of donor funding don’t fully explain the disparities. It’s not just the money – there must be something more.

To find out, a team led by Dr. Chizoba Wonodi at our International Vaccine Access Center (IVAC), Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, worked with the government of Nigeria to interview 126 stakeholders in 8 states that best exemplify the successes and challenges in immunization coverage.   Dr. Wonodi’s team found that often, it’s not the amount of money that’s the problem – it’s getting that money to the right places at the right times, from the federal government all the way down to the community level. When that doesn’t happen, children go unvaccinated. Conversely, innovative mechanisms can lead to success stories. In one northern state, Zamfara, leaders used a “basket fund” to pool funds at the state and local level, ensuring that resources go where they are needed.

Other non-monetary issues were important as well. Inadequate transportation was cited in the study as a near universal barrier to vaccine delivery. Transportation contracts are one solution—these contracts could even be preferentially awarded to female-owned business, empowering women while improving service delivery (I really like this one!). (more…)

Disruptive Women is honored to announce our newest blogger, Annie Levy.  Annie is working with us on our Health In Place (HIP) initiative.

Annie Levy creates images and projects that tell stories.  Stories of individuals both old and young. Stories of people who are hospital patients, residents of nursing homes, those in other medical contexts and young people dealing with life threatening illnesses.  They are people who, Ms. Levy makes clear, should not be categorized by their health status or where they are receiving treatment.  Their conditions “are not all of who they are,” she said.

Ms. Levy is a New York City-based creative director and photographer who, “creates and exhibits projects, telling stories to transform the way we see things.”  Her resume is both impressive and colorful.  Exhibits of her work have been shown in venues as diverse as the United Nations and the Alzheimer’s Association.  She has spoken to prestigious audiences such as a New York Times Foundation program for journalists at the International Longevity Center.  She has shared her perspectives during a Grand Rounds presentation at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

She began exploring the idea of telling personal stories through images during her student days at the New York University film school, but it’s through her work in various engagements that her unique abilities to transform individuals from medical files to three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood individuals has been honed to an extraordinary fine art.  Some examples:

• Her month-long lobby exhibit, “Ageless” at the United Nations paired her images of older individuals with their art work. “I called the project ‘Ageless’ as I felt that older people were being categorized and labeled and the concept behind the show was to display creativity and its transcendence of a particular age.  I wanted to remind people that you can’t categorize people because of their age.”
• Her portraits of geriatric rehabilitation patients at New York City’s Roosevelt Hospital.  “I noticed that, on the hospital walls, there were the standard bright, colorful art posters that you see in most hospitals, but nothing that genuinely related to what was going on there.  I wanted to depict the individuals of Roosevelt Hospital in ways that spoke of their determination, courage, and love of life in a setting where that was both being displayed and very much mattered.” (more…)

When patients become more actively involved in their own health, there’s a much stronger likelihood their health outcomes will be better.

That’s why “Questions are the Answer,” a new public education initiative from the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), encourages patients to have more effective two-way communication with their doctors and other clinicians.

“Questions are the Answer” features a website — where you will find these free educational tools to use with your patients:

• A 7-minute video featuring real-life patients and clinicians who give firsthand accounts on the importance of asking questions and sharing information – this tool is ideal for a patient waiting room area and can be set to run on a continuous loop.
• A brochure, titled “Be More Involved in Your Health Care: Tips for Patients,” that offers helpful suggestions to follow before, during and after a medical visit.
• Notepads to help patients prioritize the top three questions they wish to ask during their medical appointment.

Clinicians can request a free supply of these materials by calling AHRQ at 1-800-358-9295 or sending an email to AHRQpubs@ahrq.hhs.gov.