Articles Tagged ‘quality’

Health & Healthcare | By December 21, 2008 | By Maria Goddard, MD | 3 Comments

The Doctor Can’t See You Right Now, He’s Napping

Health and Healthcare Category On December 2nd, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a report suggesting that resident physicians have further limits on work hours than those enacted in 2003 by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). While the number of hours per week would remain at the ACGME maximum of 80, the IOM recommends on 30-hour shifts that a “protected sleep period” of 5 hours occurs between 10pm-8am. These measures are aimed at reducing physician fatigue and the number of resultant medical mistakes. Read more →

Going Green for Health Inequality | November 25, 2008 | 2 Comments

There is little argument that physical activity promotes good health, and that outdoor “green space” such as parks, forests, and recreation fields, promotes physical activity. Many studies have concluded that access to such space has an independent benefit on health and health-related behaviors. Now, however, there is evidence that access to green space many actually reduce the disparities in health care inequality related to socioeconomic status.

A new study published in The Lancet postulates that exposure to quality outdoor recreational space mitigates factors that lead to disease for populations in a lower socioeconomic position. Read more →

Concierge Medicine – The Future or the Past? | June 21, 2008 | 7 Comments

The current US healthcare system is broken. Few would argue this point. Rising costs, decreasing reimbursements, more lawsuits, insurance hikes, and an aging population are just some of the difficulties that face both physicians and patients today, and the situation doesn’t seem to be improving.

One of the other major problems is the shortage of time. In order to make ends meet, doctors are being forced to see more and more patients in the same amount of time. For many physicians, what used to be an hour for new patients and half hour for established patients has been shrunk down to 20 minutes for a new patient and 10 minutes for an established one. Read more →

Expensive Wine Just Tastes Better | February 04, 2008 | 0 Comments

A recent study reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrates that marketing can have a significant effect on the neural mechanisms governing decision-making. The study measured the “experienced pleasantness” of three different wines, both by subjective reporting of the test subjects’ perceptions of the wines, and by measuring activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, a known “pleasure center” in the brain. Test results indicated that even when wines were identical, subjects’ levels of experienced pleasantness differed according to the reported price of the wine; the same wine tasted better when the subject believed that it was a sample from a $45 bottle of wine than when she was told it was from a $5 bottle. Read more →