Expand Your Mind: Health Research and Innovation
by Miki Saxon
Innovation is often a direct result of research, but they both depend on a willingness to look at the tangible and intangible in new ways and healthcare and medicine (not the same thing) are starting to benefit. Here are a few things that caught my interest.
The Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, which has long been a medical innovator, has turned its attention to better ways to use IT to improve patient outcomes. (For many years the Clinic has had its own company formed specifically to commercialize its discoveries, leading to conflict-of-interest accusations.)
The clinic is a pioneer in providing information to patients and linking patient involvement with medical records and healthcare practice improvement. It is also vigorously experimenting with medical IT in new forms of patient engagement and education, including social media.
Startup Healthy Labs is creating social websites that target specific chronic medical conditions, such as Crohn’s Disease and Colitis, which are verifiably for patients.
…patient-only networks — people have to be verified as actually being diagnosed with the relevant issues before they can join. This is meant to keep out people shilling for pharmaceuticals and certain holistic “cures,” and keep the community centered around the real folks who are dealing with chronic diseases at hand.
Practice Fusion is for the rest of us, providing the kind of central medical repository that has been talked about for years, but doing it cost effectively.
… a massive database of information for medical professionals and patients that includes everything from records and vitals to doctor reviews, has data for more than 50 million patients. More than 150,000 medical professionals use it to keep track of patient data.
Experts researching the outlandish rising costs of US Healthcare are finally focusing on a major cause—the American attitude of ‘more is better’.
But an epidemic of overtreatment — too many scans, too many blood tests, too many procedures — is costing the nation’s health care system at least $210 billion a year, according to the Institute of Medicine, and taking a human toll in pain, emotional suffering, severe complications and even death.
Thanks to false information that vaccinations are the cause of autism many childhood illnesses that were seen as vanquished have made a comeback. Multiple studies have found that autism is securely tied to the world of auto immune diseases and the problems start in the womb—but the information has not been popularized.
Danish study, which included nearly 700,000 births over a decade, found that a mother’s rheumatoid arthritis, a degenerative disease of the joints, elevated a child’s risk of autism by 80 percent. Her celiac disease, an inflammatory disease prompted by proteins in wheat and other grains, increased it 350 percent.
Finally, did you know that low sperm count is a global problem? And that it is worst in Israel.
… that his stable of superior donors includes only tall, twentysomething ex-soldiers whose sperm has passed rigorous genetic testing. But finding such super sperm isn’t as easy as it used to be. Only 1 in 100 donors makes the cut. A decade ago, it was 1 in 10.
Flickr image credit: pedroelcarvalho
