Kaiser’s Blog Watch
The Kaiser Family Foundation has a new BlogWatch feature. Every Tuesday and Friday, the site will highlight some of the best health blogging on the net. Check out the inaugural edition here.
Author: Jason Shafrin
Checking in on my 96-year old grandmother
My grandmother is 96 years old and incredibly lives on her own. My mother drops off packages of food she prepares for my grandmother and gets her mail, but my grandmother still does her laundry and gets herself ready in the morning. Bringing in some help for her or moving her to an assisted living…
Decreased Mortality leads to increased investment in Education
Economists predict that longer life expectancy leads to more investment in education. For those who live a short time, sacrificing working years for education is not worthwhile if the payback period is short. For those with a longer life expectancy, an individual can reap the monetary rewards from education over a longer period of time.…
Does living in the suburbs make you fat?
Living in an urban, pedestrian friendly area may compel individuals to walk more, and thus reduce the likelihood one is obese. Living in a suburban, car-dependent area makes walking less attractive and thus could increase obesity. Some studies have shown that individuals who live in the suburbs weigh more than individuals living in urban areas.…
Cavalcade of Risk #52
There was this statistics student who, when driving his car, would always accelerate hard before coming to any junction, whizz straight over it , then slow down again once he’d got over it. One day, he took a passenger, who was understandably unnerved by his driving style, and asked him why he went so fast…
Mobile Phone Microscope
The Economist (“Doctor on Call“) has an shows that mobile phones may have another use for doctors: a microscope. “Mr Maamari is a member of a research team led by Dan Fletcher, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley, which has developed a cheap attachment to turn the digital camera on many…
Pharmaceutical price increases slowing
Joe Paduda finds the price inflation is slowing for drug purchased through Workers Comp programs. “Drug trend continues to moderate, with inflation in 2007 coming in at 4.3%. That’s a big improvement over last year’s 6.5%, which was a big improvement over the previous year’s 9.5%…” One reason for the price decline may be that…
Google Health is up and running
Today, Google has made its Google Health program publicly available. You can get a tour of Google Health here and FAQs are available here. TechCrunch has a great comparison (“…Hands-on Look“) of Google Health and Microsoft’s HealthVault. “Whereas HealthVault’s strengths seem to lie in tying together different health information silos on the back end, Google…
Medical Onshoring?
As the cost for health care has continued to rise, many Americans have looked for less expensive treatments in foreign countries. Living in San Diego, I can attest that many Southern Californians head to Tijuana to have their prescriptions filled. A Minot Daily News article (“Medical onshoring…“) claims that “more than 150,000 Americans traveled abroad…
Pharmaceuticals in Developing Countries
The Economist has an interesting article on how pharmaceutical companies are trying to hawk their wares in developing countries (“Quagmire or goldmine?“) Generally, Pharma has stayed away from selling in developing countries due to uncertainties in their level of patent protection. For instance, Brazil has “threatened to invoke compulsory licensing (a legal mechanism that, in…