Insights

<p>Here’s what we’re reading today:</p> <p><strong>Fraud Investigation:</strong> Investigators are <a href="http://www.latimes.com/health/la-me-prime-healthcare-20101012,0,151733… a Southern California hospital chain’s suspiciously high level of serious infections</a> among older patients, according to a report by CaliforniaWatch’s Lance Williams and Christina Jewett. Could it be Medicare fraud?</p>

<p><span style="font-size: small;">The people of Stockton and surrounding San Joaquin County, Calif., almost 700,000 strong, continue to experience among the worst health outcomes by any measure both statewide and nationally. I've chronicled this situation for the past eight years. At times I've been able to include proposals for change that some very dedicated community professionals have put forward. But little has changed. If anything, the county finds itself in more serious decline than ever before.

<p>What are the causes of cancer? What makes us older? If lifestyle choices like smoking cigarettes or drinking cola increase our risk of cancer, what can we do to try reverse or change these decisions? Is it even possible to reverse the damage? How proven are these theories?</p>

<p>Here’s what we’re reading today:</p> <p><strong>Obesity: </strong>The <a href="http://www.theheart.org/article/1133025.do?utm_source=twitterfeed&amp;u… Craig diet might actually work long-term</a>, new research suggests.</p>

<p>Physicians are not computers.</p> <p>One cannot expect them to retain every piece of medical knowledge that they learn over the years and apply it perfectly in every instance.</p> <p>When a physician’s bad calls and missed diagnoses start to form a pattern, though, hospital administrators and medical boards need to take action.</p> <p>Dr. Jean Francois Hibbert, an emergency room physician in Elmsford, New York, has stitched a jagged and dangerous pattern over the past two decades. After multiple run-ins with the state’s medical board, he continues to practice.</p>

<p>The world of online health communities is morphing and evolving even as we sit here at our keyboards and google "flu symptoms" then tweet that we've got a cold. So what IS emerging from the cutting edge of online health communities? How do they differ and what do they have in common? The Health 2.0 conference presented an impressive array of new online breakout health community models. You can get the run-down on them <em>all</em> here. Check it out:</p>

<p>Here’s what we’re reading today:</p> <p><strong>Health Reform:</strong> It’s official: a federal judge finally rules that the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/07/AR20101… health reform law is constitutional</a>. The ruling was hailed as a victory for the Obama administration because it’s the first to dismiss a constitutional challenge on its merits rather than a technicality. The Washington Post’s N.C. Aizenman has the story.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.reportingonhealth.org/users/wjohnsonfiercehealthcarecom">Wen… Johnson</a> spent five years as a reporter at newspapers in Cape Cod and then on Capitol Hill before taking the leap to the B2B (business-to-business) media world.</p> <p>"It's something that I fell into accidentally," Johnson says. But she discovered that writing about one industry for a new audience of executives and others in healthcare was both "really interesting" and viable. "I could see that there was a career track here."</p>

<p>Pity Dr. Benjamin Levine, a rheumatologist licensed in New Jersey, who, by all accounts, has done nothing but a fine job since earning his medical license in 2005.</p> <p>Levine happens to have the same name as a family practice doctor with a long history of molesting patients and defrauding insurance companies. And, because the Medical Board of New Jersey does such a lousy job of providing the public information on the doctors it has disciplined, it gives people the mistaken impression that the Squeaky Clean Dr. Levine is actually the Former Inmate Dr. Levine.</p>

<p>In the intersection of online communities and health, Health 2.0 focused a session on behavior change. With so many of our chronic diseases due to lifestyle choices, online communities and tools hold the promise to help people make small, hard, and sustained incremental steps. The session reviewed some recent approaches, and the key to their success.</p>