A hearing over the Internal Revenue Service and Affordable Care Act, alas, didn't have quite the collegial tone as the MGMA meeting. Indeed, it got downright devilish.
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While the atmosphere at the Medical Group Management Association annual conference in San Diego was highly collegial, some traces of Washington's toxic political environment did seep into the event.
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Outliers knows there are all kinds of ways to promote healthier eating habits, so we were intrigued to hear about two universities that are putting some solutions right in students' hands.At the University of New Hampshire, students in dining halls are finding plates imprinted with recommended dietary guidelines to help them decide whether they really need another piece of fried chicken or should load up on veggies instead.
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“They've shut down the government over an ideological crusade to deny affordable health insurance to millions of Americans.”—President Barack Obama
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Andrew Michail, a 20-year-old pre-med student at Wayne State University, wanted to make a difference in the lives of low-income patients whom he helped during volunteer stints at medical clinics in Detroit.He noticed many clinic patients were in dire need of medical equipment—wheelchairs, walkers, canes and oxygen tanks—and other materials such as diabetes-testing supplies, meters and syringes for insulin. The Detroit medical clinics that served the poor also needed equipment such as EKGs, heart defibrillators, blood pressure cuffs and medical beds.
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Last week's government shutdown shuttered national parks and furloughed more than 800,000 federal workers. But Outliers was left wondering, what about the federal mice? And don't forget the federal rats.
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If last week's government shutdown left you nauseated, Outliers hopes you were in Pittsburgh. The Steel City had the distinct honor of hosting the first ever international vomiting conference. Of if you want to be formal, “Biology and Control of Nausea and Vomiting 2013.” Of course this struck Outliers as pretty hilarious, but don't tell that to the experts.
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Former Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart has a new piece of equipment accompanying him on his latest tour—a cap fitted with electrodes that capture his brain activity and direct the movements of a light show while he's jamming on stage.The sensor-studded headgear is an outgrowth of collaboration between Hart and Adam Gazzaley, a University of California at San Francisco neuroscientist who studies cognitive decline and prevention.
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For children with chronic medical conditions, being stuck in a hospital can be, at times, scary, stressful, lonely and even mind-numbingly boring. But at Miami Children's Hospital, young patients and their families will be able to channel those feelings into creative art projects during two hourlong programs each month that will also feature storytelling and puppetry.
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Outliers has always thought of the profusion of acronyms in healthcare as just annoying. But now, one has sparked a legal battle, as University HealthSystem Consortium is suing UnitedHealth Group over the use of “UHC.”
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“I would like you to put my trauma center out of business. I really would. I would like to not be an expert on gunshots.”—Dr. Janis Orlowski, chief operating officer of MedStar Washington Hospital Center, which treated many victims of the Sept. 16 mass shooting at the Washington Navy YardFollow Outliers on Twitter: @MHOutliers
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An experiment that showed the felicitous effects of listening to Italian opera for mice after a heart transplant was among the winners at this year's Ig Nobel Prize ceremony.This is the 23rd year for the award, sponsored by the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research and given out to honor weird and humorous scientific discoveries. The winners come from all over the world to attend the ceremony. The event also had a live webcast, with watching parties catching the action in Paris, Atlanta, Raleigh, N.C., and beyond.
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Outliers knows it's tough to see your favorite NFL team lose again and again. Turns out it's not just bad for your morale to be a fan of teams like the hapless Detroit Lions, it's bad for your waistline—and your neighbors' waistlines, too. A study published in the journal Psychological Science found that on the Monday after an NFL game, residents of cities with losing teams ate 16% more saturated fat than usual. And the trend held true even for people who aren't football fans.
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Results of a study on cognitive decline found aging brains may benefit from a video game. The study, published in the journal Nature, found attention and functional memory got a boost among older adults who played a custom-designed video game. Dr. Adam Gazzaley of the University of California, San Francisco, one of the researchers involved in the study, told the Associated Press the results suggest that tailored video games could be used by aging adults or those with depression, dementia or post-traumatic stress, but he said more research is needed.
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Outliers has long known that competition among Pittsburgh's health systems and insurers has been fierce and caustic, with skirmishes between major players spilling into courtrooms and headlines.
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During her four years as America's doctor, the 18th surgeon general of the U.S. made it her mission to stress chronic-disease prevention. So it was no surprise during Dr. Regina Benjamin's marquee performance at Modern Healthcare's Sept. 9 gala honoring the 50 Most Influential Physician Executives in Healthcare that she included an injunction to get up and dance (to shake off a few of the extra calories to be consumed during a mouth-watering surf-and-turf dinner).
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“Big systems, consolidated medical groups, urgent-care centers, free-standing emergency rooms, retail clinics, community health centers, traditional community hospitals … just about any of these facilities nationwide would take another primary-care doctor if one walked in the door. … In today's delivery model, it's all about the primary-care physician. He who dies with the most wins.”—Mark Smith, president of Merritt Hawkins in Forbes Follow Outliers on Twitter: @MHOutliers
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It's the little things that add up. Like the minutes it takes annually to deal with each patient's HIPAA notice of privacy practices for protected healthcare information. Annually, that task eats up about 30.7 million hours of healthcare workers' and patients' time. Think of it as 35 centuries worth of bureaucracy.
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The sight of coral, honeycombs or lotus blossoms don't send you into a panic? Then you must not be a trypophobe, or one who suffers from the fear of clusters of holes. Trypophobia is what one scientist calls “the most common phobia you've never heard of.” Even Outliers has to confess we hadn't heard of it.
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Being short on cash may make you a bit slower in the brain, a new study suggests.People worrying about having enough money to pay their bills tend to lose temporarily the equivalent of 13 IQ points, scientists found when they gave intelligence tests to shoppers at a New Jersey mall and farmers in India. The idea is that financial stress monopolizes thinking, making other calculations slower and more difficult, sort of like the effects of going without sleep for a night.
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If you're a baby boomer healthcare worker in Augusta, Ga., Outliers suspects you don't like your co-workers much. At least that's the word in a new report from Payscale.com, which looked at more than 28,000 responses from the website's users.
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If someone asks Federation of American Hospitals President and CEO Chip Kahn what happened during his summer vacation, he can say he had a fowl time.
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The hunt for the Griffin, a ship built and once commanded by legendary French explorer La Salle, has taken an unlikely detour from northern Lake Michigan to a small-town hospital, where modern technology may help determine whether a wooden slab is wreckage from the 17th century vessel.
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Public health departments can add another tool to their arsenal in tracking food poisoning: Twitter. Given that people may choose to tweet about their unfortunate food encounters, researchers can pinpoint—using GPS information embedded in tweets sent from cellphones—where people are posting about such experiences and better monitor them.
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"Partners (HealthCare System) might claim they are more efficient. But does (a merger) add more services or boost up the price? One of the big issues is, when Partners gets hold of an entity, it also extracts bigger prices.''—Healthcare economist Stuart Altman in a Boston Globe story on the Boston-based system receiving nearly one-third of all the money Massachusetts insurers spent on acute hospital care last year Follow Outliers on Twitter: @MHOutliers
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