AT&T sets its sights on the ‘telehealth’ industry

The doctor will see you now. Or at least in the few seconds it takes AT&T to relay your vital signs over its broadband network.

The telecommunications giant has big plans to establish a foothold in the “telehealth” industry, an emerging field that links patients and physicians across the country via video and medical-information technology.

“These days, everybody is talking about medical care: Who gets it? Who pays for it? Who decides?” said Robert Miller, executive director of technical research at AT&T and a 40-year veteran at the company’s Florham Park research labs. “But few people are working on a technology solution that would lower costs and make medical care better at the same time.”

AT&T scientist have spent the past year working on prototypes of products aimed at the home health care market. The idea is to make everyday household items “part of the network cloud,” said Miller, holding up a pair of fuzzy bedroom slippers. They look perfectly ordinary, but they are actually one of many telehealth products in the pipeline at AT&T.

Question:

Do you think that organizations outside of health care should join the health care market with their technologies or should they remain separate?

To read the rest of this article please visit:

http://www.nj.com/business/index.ssf/2009/12/att_develops_household_items_t.html

Squeezing Money Out of Home Health Care

Harold Pollack, an expert in social services administration, says the Congressional bills contain oversight measures that may help control costs and improve the quality of home health services.

Under the health care bills currently being debated in Congress, more than 30 million uninsured Americans would gain coverage. To help offset the costs, the Senate legislation would reduce Medicare spending on home health care services, which have grown in the push to keep Medicare patients out of hospitals and nursing homes.

Can home care agencies become more productive, as Congress assumes? Waste and fraud are a serious concern, but can these problems be effectively limited and does the current legislation address the challenges?

For the rest of this insightful article please visit:

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/02/squeezing-money-out-of-home-health-care/

Strenuous exercise may help slow aging process, study says

For years, a mantra of medicine has been that you can’t do much about your genetic makeup.

A new study has found, however, that strenuous, long-term exercise may have anti-aging properties by virtue of its effect on chromosomes.

“People automatically assume there’s not anything you can do about your genetics,” said Patrick McBride, a professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “We can exercise our chromosomes.”

McBride, who was not a part of the study, said the new research helps explain on a cellular level many of the known benefits of exercise.

“Regular exercise is an anti-aging activity,” he said.

While the study did not show that exercise can change genes, it suggests that exercise may have beneficial properties at a chromosomal level, specifically on telomeres, the ends of chromosomes that are believed to have an impact on aging.

“I think this is a blockbuster study,” said Barry Franklin, a physiologist at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich.

Telomeres are like the biological clocks of cells, said Franklin, who was not a part of the study.

He said the study may help explain why exercise reduces the risk of so many diseases.

To read the rest of this very interesting article please visit:

http://www.jsonline.com/features/health/78162577.html

Home nurses play indispensable role in long-term care

GALESBURG, Ill. — Janice Bragg didn’t like the way her husband was being cared for in a nursing home.

She said she figured she could do better, and with the help of two nurses from Western Illinois Home Health Care she feels she has. But she couldn’t do it without them. “You just don’t know how much they help,” she said. Bragg’s husband can no longer walk and must be fed through a feeding tube.

“He’s good in the morning and he knows me, and in the afternoon he doesn’t,” she said.

Bragg said she’s 72 and in good health, so there’s a lot she can handle around the house, but there are things she still struggles with. The most helpful service the nurses provide is bathing Bragg’s husband, but she said she can depend on them for almost anything. She’s called them with questions, problems and small emergencies, and always received a quick response. “It doesn’t make any difference if it’s a holiday or not,” she said.

Bragg and her husband are just one of 1,355,300 patients and their families who subscribe to home health care services in the United States, according to a 2000 survey by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

For the rest of this article please visit:

http://www.norwichbulletin.com/lifestyles/health/x1945272701/Home-nurses-play-indispensable-role-in-long-term-care

ER Visits for Elderly Rise During Thanksgiving

 

WEDNESDAY, Nov. 25 (HealthDay News) — Thanksgiving is a time of eating turkey, gathering with family — and sometimes taking your elderly loved one to the emergency room.

According to a New York City physician, here’s why: When family members who have not seen each other in months gather during the holiday season, they are often alarmed by the health of their older relatives and rush them to the hospital, sometimes unnecessarily, said Dr. Tamara Kuittinen, director of medical education in the Department of Emergency Medicine, at Lenox Hill Hospital.

Kuittinen’s observations are not exactly scientific, but over the years she and her colleagues have seen definite increases in the numbers of elderly patients seeking care in emergency departments during this time of year. Her colleague, Dr. Carl Ramsay, associate chairman of Lenox Hill’s department of emergency medicine, said he sees a 10 percent to 20 percent increase in the number of elderly emergency department admissions during the holidays.

The cause is probably twofold: relatives often don’t keep up with their loved one’s health over the course of the year. So, when they get together, they are often shocked by the condition of the elderly family member. Also, Kuittinen added, children of aging parents often are not aware of how the normal aging process takes its toll on people, and they rush their loved one to a health-care provider.

 

To read the rest of the article to help keep your loved ones health in check, please visit:

http://health.usnews.com/articles/health/healthday/2009/11/25/er-visits-for-elderly-rise-during-thanksgiving.html

 

Every patient needs an advocate

Two days after surgery to replace both my knees, a social worker employed by the hospital told me that the insurance company would not pay for me to stay any longer. Seeing that I was barely able to get to the bathroom on my own, she told the company I was not ready to enter rehab and insisted that I needed at least another day in the hospital.

She was right, and I was grateful for the intervention. I was in no shape to argue with insurance bureaucrats whose goal is to save money and who had no interest in, nor any way to assess, my well-being.

As health issues go, mine was a relatively minor concern. I now realize that in the complex world of modern medicine, nearly all patients, and especially those who are critically ill, need an advocate, someone to negotiate with medical professionals, insurers and others to ensure that they are receiving optimal care.

David Wayne Smith, a disability specialist at the Arizona Arthritis Center in Tucson, became an advocate for his 58-year-old son, who had been thrown from a horse and lay near death in a hospital room 500 miles away. He had several broken ribs, bruised lungs and serious breathing problems, Smith wrote in the September-October issue of Arthritis Self-Management. For three long weeks, during which there were many close calls with death, his son lay in a drug-induced coma.

Steeling himself against profound feelings of helplessness and fear, Smith realized he had to become part of his son’s treatment team as a patient advocate.

To read the rest of this article please visit:

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/health/story/1072277.html

Good catch! Olive Branch toddler helps in delivery of baby brother

Two-year-old Jeremiha Taylor doesn’t have to ask his mother where babies come from — he helped deliver   his little brother at the foot of his family’s living room couch.

“He’s my little hero,” Jeremiha’s mom, Bobbye Favazza, 27, of Olive Branch, said Tuesday. “It was like he knew what to do.”

Favazza gave birth to a 7-pound, 4-ounce baby boy, Kamron Taylor, on Friday morning. Firefighters arrived moments later to cut the umbilical cord.

Greg Mynatt, an emergency services supervisor with the city, said the 911 call about Favazza was probably the third this year about a woman in labor, but usually the mother makes it to the hospital before delivery.

Even rarer is a child assisting with delivery. Mynatt did not recall it ever happening here.

“This would probably be the first,” he said.

Jeremiha can count to five, feed himself and go to the potty himself. He communicates in short sentences.

For the rest of the article please visit:

http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2009/nov/18/good-catch-toddler-helps-in-delivery-of-baby/?partner=popular

Caregiver Crunch: How To Find Affordable Care

This month is National Long Term Care Awareness Month. Based on thirty-five years working in the field ofaging, I have reached some personal conclusions about long term care and its funding. Here goes.

Learning from my mom and dad’s experience.
I grew up in the 1950s and 60s in a close-knit, hard-working family. My parents both worked full-time to pay the bills, send my brother and me to college while saving frugally for their own retirement nest egg. Still very much alive at 86 and 89, my mom and dad live in a retirement community in South Florida. I live 3,000 miles away with my wife and kids in California, while my older brother lives in New Jersey – near where we grew up.

Today, my dad has diabetes and heart disease and has been blind for a decade due to macular degeneration. While still sharp as a tack, and ready for a political argument 24/7, he can’t drive, read or handle many of the normal activities of daily living without a full-time aide. My mom – who remains the “heart” of our family – also requires ongoing assistance. She has COPD – which means she must spend three hours a day on a nebulizer. In the past several years, she has had a heart bypass surgery, a hip replacement and is grappling with memory loss.

To read the rest of this article please visit:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ken-dychtwald/caregiver-crunch-how-to-f_b_357066.html

New technology is helping elderly patients and those with chronic diseases monitor their condition from the comfort of home.

The Woods, of Catonsville, Md., are participants in one of several pilot projects that home health-care providers,retirement communities and others are conducting to see if high-tech but simple devices can help doctors closely monitor aging patients at home in a way that will help control problems before they escalate and cut back on the need for costly long-term care and hospital admissions — especially repeat hospital visits for chronic conditions.

Although proponents of health-care reform tout its potential for improving efficiency, often missing from the national debate are specific examples of how changes in the system might improve patient outcomes and reduce costs. These pilot projects are exploring some easy-to-use technology that might make a difference to patients and doctors.

retirement communities and others are conducting to see if high-tech but simple devices can help doctors closely monitor aging patients at home in a way that will help control problems before they escalate and cut back on the need for costly long-term care and hospital admissions — especially repeat hospital visits for chronic conditions.

Although proponents of health-care reform tout its potential for improving efficiency, often missing from the national debate are specific examples of how changes in the system might improve patient outcomes and reduce costs. These pilot projects are exploring some easy-to-use technology that might make a difference to patients and doctors.

To read the rest of this article please visit:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/16/AR2009111602900.html

Wii virtual exercise as good as the real thing

People could expend more energy playing the Wii Sports games or doing aerobics and yoga with the Wii Fit than during a brisk walk, the researchers found.

The study said a third of the activities on the games console required energy expenditure that is the equivalent to “moderate intensity exercise” of the kind the Government recommends to keep fit and healthy.

Adults in Britain are recommended to take 30 minutes of moderate intensity exercise five or more days a week.

It comes after the Wii became the first games console to be endorsed by the NHS and elderly people are taking up the games to stay active in residential homes.

More than 50 million Wii consoles have been sold globally since it was launched in 2006. As well as traditional video games, there are a range of sports and a balance board for players to stand on to practice activities from skiing and yoga to dance and aerobics.

For the rest of the article please visit:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/6581238/Wii-virtual-exercise-as-good-as-the-real-thing.html