At the conclusion of the Phoenix Open professional golf tournament last week, course managers found their facility all dressed up with 1,200 healthy water lilies but nowhere to go. Word got around about their availability, but no takers emerged. Like, what would you do with 1,200 water-rooted plants in the middle of an urban desert? [...] Learn More →

That’s the message in a recent book, The Spirit Level, which argues that economic inequality, not overall wealth, level of poverty or cultural differences, is the chief reason for societal breakdown. The authors present a wealth of data, much of it showing the U.S. near the top of the charts among OECD countries for social [...] Learn More →

Going it alone is not an option in fostering healthy communities, and it is certainly not an option in fostering a Healthy Arizona. Yet the structure of much of the nonprofit sector, including philanthropy, encourages fragmentation into a series of functional one-trick ponies: we do health, you do housing, another helps victims of domestic violence, [...] Learn More →

Recently the Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association released a study calculating the economic impact of proposed massive cuts to AHCCCS (Medicaid) and the Arizona Department of Health Services. It’s devastating. We got here by spending too much money and not taking in enough revenue. We got here by letting the good times roll and not [...] Learn More →

Does Arizona have the governance and collaborative capacity in place to maximize both external and internal investments in health information technology and health information exchanges? To address that question in an independent and objective way, Learn More →

Join your company’s wellness program instead. If your employer doesn’t have one, get them to start one. A recent meta-analysis of the literature on costs and savings associated with workplace disease prevention and wellness programs found that medical costs fell by $3.27 for ever dollar spent on these programs, and absenteeism costs fell by $2.73 for every dollar spent. Learn More →

“We have great potential. Anything we do for primary care is going to be an improvement, because we’re doing it all wrong now.” - family medicine physician/educator Practically no one thinks the “primary care parade” discussed in Part One of “Goodbye, Hello: Framing the Future of Primary Care” is sustainable in the future. With almost [...] Learn More →

Wouldn't you be interested in getting the best value for money spent? In an interesting study documented in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the authors reviewed over 2,000 peer reviewed articles on new innovative therapies that included both cost and benefit in their analyses. While most of these increased cost and benefit, there were a few that saved a significant amount of money in exchange for a very small decrease in quality: savings from $122 to $12,000 in exchange for losses in quality-adjusted life years of about eight hours to one week. Learn More →

Physicians in a variety of specialties spend considerable time consulting with patients on the identification and treatment of medical issues. In the case of neurology, for example, about 90 percent of all new outpatient visits are coded as “consultations.” If you’re a physician seeing someone for the first time who may have a complicated disease [...] Learn More →

Will be impossible for approximately 350,000 Arizonans who will be dropped from the Medicaid program’s rolls if Governor Brewer’s proposal to ask voters to rescind Prop. 204 is successfully implemented and limits program eligibility to 33-36 percent (with a variety of exceptions) of the federal poverty level from the 100 percent it is today. If [...] Learn More →