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Delivering the Clinical Conference Experience Online: 
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| From Green Cay Park Visit 041809 |
Green Cay - 12800 Hagen Ranch Road • Boynton Beach • (561) 966-7000 • Located in suburban Delray Beach on the east side of Hagen Ranch Road between Woolbright Road and Atlantic Avenue. 100+ acres of farm land have been transformed by Palm Beach County Water Utilities Department into a wetlands ecosystem. A railed boardwalk with frequent rest stops, some of them shaded, traverses this wildlife habitat. There is also a 9,000-square-foot nature center that includes a turtle pond, frog habitats, an alligator hole and murals depicting what the land, previously the Green Cay Farm, looked like decades ago. Admission is free. |
| From Green Cay Park Visit 041809 |
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| From Green Cay Park Visit 041809 |
| Time to Call the Doctor in Your Pocket? |
| Thursday, Februay 19, 2009 - A new initiative was launched at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona this week that aims to take advantage of the ubiquity of mobile phones to help foster better healthcare around the world. Several weeks ago we heard about how cell phones can be used to test for diseases when labs and clinics aren't available. The Rockefeller Foundation, the UN Foundation and The Vodafone Foundation announced the Mobile Health (mHealth) Alliance this week in Barcelona, a new initiative that hopes to put cell phones to better use and expand the availability of care. Quoting Terry Kramer, strategy director at British operator Vodafone, the AFP reports, "When you consider that there are 2.2 billion mobile phones in the developing world, 305 million computers but only 11 million hospital beds you can instantly see how mobiles can create effective solutions to address health care challenges." Forrester analyst Elizabeth Boehm said, "One of the main challenges, in mobile health, is that people who are most in need of health care are usually more aged, so they don't use the mobile or they're not comfortable with it." One of the goals of the mHealth Alliance is to change that. Mobile phones are capable of monitoring blood glucose, administering tests, reminding patients when to take their medicines, and used as alternative means to contact healthcare professionals to provide care over-the-phone when they aren't available in person. The mHealth Alliance is charged with increasing the awareness of how these tools can be put to better use. |
| February 13, 2009 — US physicians increasingly support a single-payer national health insurance system, according to the results of a survey reported online January 29 in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. “Many politicians may mistakenly believe that single-payer national health insurance lacks support among key stakeholders such as doctors,” lead author Danny McCormick, from Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA), said in a news release. “Our finding that support for single-payer national health insurance now approaches that of tax-based incremental reforms suggests that a Medicare-for-all-type plan may be more politically viable than conventional wisdom suggests.” The goal of this US nationally representative mail survey was to evaluate physician opinion regarding financing options for expanding coverage for and access to healthcare. Between March 2007 and October 2007, US physicians involved in direct patient care were asked to rate their support for reform options such as financial incentives to encourage people to buy health insurance and single-payer national health insurance, as well as to rate their views of several aspects of access to healthcare. Of 3300 physicians sent the survey, 1675 (50.8%) responded; 49% prefer either tax incentives or penalties to promote the purchase of health insurance; 42% prefer a government-run, taxpayer-financed single-payer national health insurance program, which increased from 26% in a study 5 years previously; and only 9% prefer the current, employer-based financing system. Regarding access to healthcare, 89% of physicians surveyed believe that all Americans should receive needed medical care regardless of ability to pay; 33% believe that the uninsured currently have access to needed care; and 19.3% believe that even the insured lack access to needed care. Opinions regarding access were independently associated with support for single-payer national health insurance. "Surveys show that a majority of Americans support a single-payer system. It's not surprising that increasing numbers of doctors do,” said coauthor David Bor, MD, also from Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance. “Single payer is the only proposal that can cover all Americans, for all needed care, without driving up healthcare costs. National health insurance would eliminate the massive administrative costs and hassles imposed by our current multiplicity of private insurers.” Limitations of this study include modest response rate; the possibility that physicians strongly interested in health policy issues may have been more likely to respond; lack of generalizability to all physicians’ views; and possible misinterpretation of question meaning or bias related to question wording and response option content. “Although a plurality of physicians favored incremental health care reform proposals based on the use of tax credits and penalties, a substantial proportion of physicians preferred an entirely different health care financing system — a government-run, taxpayer-financed single-payer [national health insurance] program,” the study authors write. “Physicians play a central role in the health care system and these views could be influential in reforming the financing of the American health care system.” The Department of Medicine at the Cambridge Hospital funded this study. The authors have disclosed no relevant financial relationships. J Gen Intern Med. Published online January 29, 2009. |
