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Accelerated partnerships critical to ensuring malaria elimination goals

Writing in the Huffington Post's "Impact" blog in advance of the Monitoring & Evaluation Reference Group (MERG) meeting convened by the Roll Back Malaria Partnership and taking place in Namibia this week, Lucy Chesire, executive director and secretary to the board of the TB ACTION Group, interviews Roly Gosling, current head of the Malaria Elimination Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco, "regarding malaria elimination, its importance, and why the Global Fund is critical to achieving that goal worldwide."

19 Jan 2013

Nurse practitioners, certified midwives and PAs can provide safe early abortion care

First trimester abortions are just as safe when performed by trained nurse practitioners, physician assistants and certified nurse midwives as when conducted by physicians, according to a new six-year study led by UCSF.

19 Jan 2013

UnitedHealth indicates limited participation in state-based exchanges

CEO Stephen Hemsley said Thursday that the insurer expects to participate in 10 to 25 of these marketplaces and noted that there should be no assumptions that the company will participate widely. His announcement comes along with news that the company's 4th quarter profits were down slightly, which was mainly attributed to rising medical costs.

19 Jan 2013

Checklists can help surgical teams perform better during emergencies

When doctors, nurses and other hospital operating room staff follow a written safety checklist to respond when a patient experiences cardiac arrest, severe allergic reaction, bleeding followed by an irregular heart beat or other crisis during surgery, they are nearly 75 percent less likely to miss a critical clinical step, according to a new study funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

19 Jan 2013

China, U.K. form global health partnership

"The Chinese and British governments are cooperating on a program to improve global health policy for developing countries, with the launch in Beijing on January 16 of a new U.K.-China partnership," China Daily reports.

19 Jan 2013

Ban on thiomersal in vaccines would harm global immunization efforts

"Government representatives are meeting in Geneva this week to decide whether to introduce a global ban on mercury that could include thiomersal, a mercury-based preservative that has been used in some vaccine manufacturing since the 1930s to prevent bacterial or fungal contamination of multidose vials of vaccine," Seth Berkley, a medical epidemiologist and chief executive of the GAVI Alliance, writes in a New York Times opinion piece.

19 Jan 2013

Final day of global maternal health conference focuses on human rights

In her last report from the Second Global Maternal Health Conference in Arusha, Tanzania, Jocalyn Clark, senior editor of PLoS Medicine, writes in the PLoS "Speaking of Medicine" blog about the final day of the three-day conference.

19 Jan 2013

State highlights: Trying to save care for poor with Medicaid budget deals

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley asked legislators in her third State of the State address Wednesday to overhaul how public schools are funded, improve crumbling roads, and make prisons a safer place for those who guard the most violent offenders. She pledged to work to improve residents' health, especially in rural areas, without expanding Medicaid. For example, she said, next year the state's Medicaid agency will begin fully reimbursing rural hospitals for uncompensated care.

19 Jan 2013

Calif. officials push campaigns informing public of health law's new provisions

Officials in California seek to inform the public of what the health care law does for insurance coverage and health care with a series of public campaigns.

19 Jan 2013

Va. lawmakers block abortion ultrasound repeal; Other state abortion news

Lawmakers in Virginia blocked a repeal of a state law that requires women to have an ultrasound before an abortion as well as a law that requires stricter regulation of abortion clinics. In the meantime, however, a state Senate committee there killed a proposal that would have forbidden public money from being used for abortions where the fetus is likely to be deformed and unlikely to survive.

19 Jan 2013

Results from Maricich Healthcare Communications’ executive survey

Maricich Healthcare Communications has teamed with the American Medical Group Association (AMGA), the Council of Accountable Physician Practices (CAPP) and the Society for Healthcare Strategy & Market Development (SHSMD) to conduct the first healthcare executive survey to study change management communications for accountable healthcare.

19 Jan 2013

Research roundup: Ameliorating physician shortages; Patients' perceptions of bias

The authors note that there is a consensus "that the current shortage of primary care physicians will worsen over the next ten years as the nation's population grows and ages and as insurance coverage expands as a result of the Affordable Care Act." They examine whether workplace changes will impact that assessment.

19 Jan 2013

Deriving lessons from cholera epidemic in Haiti and looking forward to future actions

Noting U.N. peacekeepers played a role in bringing cholera to Haiti, Victoria Fan, a research fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD), writes in the group's "Global Health Policy" blog, "Blame aside, there are undoubtedly lessons to be learned by looking back at how this epidemic came to pass in Haiti. More importantly, looking ahead there are key steps that should be taken to eliminate cholera in Haiti."

19 Jan 2013

WSU researcher to help determine success of Txt4health diabetes intervention program

A Wayne State University researcher has received a combined $36,000 in grants from the Southeastern Michigan Health Association and Greater Cincinnati HealthBridge, Inc. to help determine the success of a Type 2 diabetes intervention program currently being piloted in southeast Michigan, greater Cincinnati and New Orleans.

19 Jan 2013

Greenway earns ONC HIT certificate for PrimeSUITE 2014

Greenway Medical Technologies, Inc., announced today that Greenway PrimeSUITE 2014 (17.0) is compliant with the ONC 2014 Edition criteria and was certified as an EHR Module on Jan. 15, 2013 by the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT), an ONC-ACB, in accordance with the applicable eligible provider certification criteria adopted by the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

19 Jan 2013

Link between air pollution and people's happiness

Researchers in Canada have found a correlation between air pollution and people's happiness. Their deep analysis, reported in the latest issue of the International Journal of Green Economics, suggests that air pollution may lead to unhappiness while the converse is also true, the unhappier the citizens of a country the more air pollution.

19 Jan 2013