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View Health Affairs Diabetes Briefing


January 26th, 2012
by Chris Fleming

Video of the release event for the January issue of Health Affairs, “Confronting The Growing Diabetes Crisis,” is now available on the Health Affairs Web site.

It Takes A Village: Caring For Children With Diabetes


January 23rd, 2012
 
by Michelle Katz and Lori Laffel

Editor’s Note: The January 2012 issue of Health Affairs is a thematic volume titled “Confronting The Growing Diabetes Crisis.” Ariella was a different child, thin and shy, when I first met her about a year and a half ago, just after her 6th birthday. Her mother had noted her thirst and hunger, and, despite this [...]

The Diabetes Threat: Can It Be Contained?


January 11th, 2012
by Chris Fleming

Diabetes now affects nearly twenty-six million Americans, and over the next decade, an estimated forty million more US adults could develop the condition. Another 100 million more could suffer from an insidious prediabetic condition, one that often leads to the full-blown disease.  Growing scientific evidence suggests that lifestyle interventions, such as weight loss and fitness [...]

Young People With Diabetes Fare Worse Educationally, Financially


January 10th, 2012
by Chris Fleming

Having diabetes can carry  many health consequences, but a new study in the January issue of Health Affairs shows that it also highly influences a young person’s ability to complete high school, be employed, and earn a living wage.  High school dropout rates among young people with diabetes are six percentage points higher than for [...]

Surgeon General To Speak At Health Affairs Diabetes Briefing


January 5th, 2012
by Chris Fleming

Surgeon General Regina Benjamin will keynote Health Affairs‘ release event for its January 2012 issue, “Confronting the Growing Diabetes Crisis.” The briefing will take place on Tuesday, January 10, from 8:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., at the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill. The new Health Affairs issue will explore the challenges that the increase in [...]

Health Affairs Briefing: Confronting The Growing Diabetes Crisis


December 23rd, 2011
by Chris Fleming

On Tuesday, January 10, Health Affairs will release its January 2012 issue, “Confronting the Growing Diabetes Crisis.” The volume explores the challenges that the increase in prevalence of prediabetes and diabetes represents for public health and health care systems in the United States and internationally. A particular focus of the issue is opportunities for diabetes [...]

Meeting To Focus On Improving Care Transitions Through Health IT


October 12th, 2011
by Chris Fleming

This Friday, Oct. 14, 2011, a working meeting of innovators, policy and health IT experts, health care providers, patient organizations, technology companies, and government agencies will convene in Washington to assess progress in improving transitions in care and prioritize how the increasing availability of health IT can address some of the most intractable challenges related [...]

Family Caregivers: A Priority For Politicians?


October 3rd, 2011
by Sean Coffey

A posting on the Health Affairs blog earlier this year by Carol Levine asked the pointed question: “The year of the family caregiver- in what country?”  In it, she compared the “Year of the Family Caregiver” in the U.S. to the recent elections in Canada, where politicians were competing to see who could provide a [...]

Coaching For Prevention: The Healthy Howard Model


September 21st, 2011
 
by Elizabeth Edsall Kromm and Peter Beilenson

Prevention is critical to reducing rates of chronic disease, premature death and disability, and controlling health care costs. This point has been made many times over by health care and health policy experts both in the United States and abroad. Unfortunately, our current health care system is not set up to incentivize prevention efforts and [...]

Berwick To Keynote Health Affairs Briefing


September 1st, 2011
by Chris Fleming

Don Berwick, the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, will keynote Health Affairs’ September 8 briefing on controlling health care costs. At the briefing, Health Affairs will release its September 2011 issue, “The New Urgency To Lower Costs.” Topics to be discussed include chronic disease costs and opportunities for savings through prevention; who bears [...]

Where To For Hospice?


August 30th, 2011
by Joanne Lynn

A column by New York Times columnist David Brooks titled “Death and Budgets,” read in combination with a recent report from the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (“Medicare Hospices that Focus on Nursing Facility Residents”), makes painfully clear how urgently America must rethink the way [...]

Health Affairs Briefing: Confronting Costs


August 10th, 2011
by Chris Fleming

On September 8, Health Affairs will release its September 2011 issue, “Confronting Costs.” The issue explores the third element of the famed Three-Part Aim for health care: namely, the objective of lowering costs. Topics to be discussed include chronic disease costs and opportunities for savings through prevention; who bears the burden of health costs; the [...]

The Beacon Communities At One Year: The Mississippi Delta Experience


July 27th, 2011
by Karen Fox, Anna Lyn Whitt, Leigh Ann Ross, and Lauren Bloodworth

The federal government’s Beacon Program provides funding to 17 communities that have already made inroads in the development of secure, private, and accurate systems of electronic health record (EHR) adoption and health information exchange. This is the fifth in a series of Health Affairs Blog posts in which leaders of several Beacon communities discuss their [...]

Bringing Diabetes Prevention To National Scale


July 20th, 2011
 
by Sachin Jain and John Brooks

The burden imposed on our society by type 2 diabetes mellitus has grown dramatically over the last decade.  Greater numbers of people than ever before are being diagnosed with diabetes at younger ages.  These people and their families must face the spectrum of implications brought on by diabetes, including its many associated medical complications. The [...]

Medicaid Spending Variations Driven More By Volume Than Price, Says Study In New Health Affairs


July 7th, 2011
by Chris Fleming

The first study of its kind to examine regional and state differences in Medicaid spending shows that there is wide variation in spending per beneficiary, and that some large states are spending more than twice as much per beneficiary as other states of similar size. What’s more, some of the interstate variation in Medicaid spending [...]

Establishing Sensible Cost-Sharing For Medicare Cancer Patients


June 24th, 2011
by Dan Mendelson

A new study by Avalere Health, presented at the recent meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, analyzed the pharmacy claims of 10,508 commercially-insured and Medicare patients who required oral therapy for cancer. The purpose of the study was to assess the effects of cost-sharing on the abandonment of these medications. The analysis showed [...]

Obesity Epidemic May Make Mortality Gains Short-Lived


June 23rd, 2011
by Chris Fleming

For those who assume that the next generation of Americans will live longer than their parents, a new “three-dimensional” method of forecasting vital health statistics shows how this may not prove to be the case. Most Americans enjoy better health today than in the past, with significant declines in death rates from the top three [...]

Health Affairs Requests Abstracts For Diabetes Issue


June 10th, 2011
by Chris Fleming

Health Affairs plans a thematic issue on the U.S. and global imperative to stem the growing burden of diabetes, which is among the top contributors to the international epidemic of noncommunicable disease. As part of our development process for this issue, which is scheduled to be published in early January 2012, we are issuing a [...]

The Beacon Communities At One Year: The Inland NW Experience


May 24th, 2011
by Jac Davies, Jennifer Polello, Daniel Hansen, Tamitha Anderson, and Thomas Fritz

Editor’s note: The federal government’s Beacon Program provides funding to 17 communities that have already made inroads in the development of secure, private, and accurate systems of electronic health record (EHR) adoption and health information exchange. This is the fourth in a series of Health Affairs Blog posts in which leaders of several Beacon communities [...]

The Beacon Communities At One Year: The SE Minnesota Experience


May 23rd, 2011
by Erin Knoebel, Daniel Jensen, Lacey Hart, and Barbara Yawn

Editor’s note: The federal government’s Beacon Program provides funding to 17 communities that have already made inroads in the development of secure, private, and accurate systems of electronic health record (EHR) adoption and health information exchange. This is the third in a series of Health Affairs Blog posts in which leaders of several Beacon communities [...]

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