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Special Contributor | Centering — Better Health Care Without Higher Costs

By: Joanne Kenen

Eight months pregnant, Elvira, 28, was poised, articulate and confident through a two-hour prenatal class. Then she formed a circle with 10 other mothers-to-be, caught a skein of bright pink yarn a nurse tossed to her, and burst into tears of gratitude. “Thank you, thank you, you have taught me so much,” Elvira said, clasping one strand of the yarn and tossing the skein on to another young woman, who gripped her strand, and tossed it on. The yarn crisscrossed their circle, binding them together in a flash of hot pink. The ...

What We Really Do – and Don’t – Know About Health in This Nation

By: David Kindig

What do we know about the levels of population health and the state of medical care and the many other determinants of health across the United States? Despite years of data collection, it has been difficult to gain a comprehensive view of population health. As Atul Gawande wrote last year in the New Yorker,

“The poverty of our health-care information is an embarrassment…The most recent data are at least three years old, if they exist at all, and aren’t broken down to a county level that communities ...

Happiness on Location: When Health Matters, So Does Place

By: Ed Kobrinski

 We all want happiness. We seek happiness for ourselves and for those we care about. Although happiness can be defined in different ways by different people, it is a state-of-being we can all relate to and seek. For some it may be a good education, for others, fulfilling relationships, or financial well-being, or a combination of things. Of course, part of the happiness equation is to have good health as well. It seems to be innate in all of us to pursue happiness for our health. Even the World Health ...

“Viewpoints” | Seeking Solutions From IT Instead of From People

By: David Kibbe

When I first came to “Health 2.0” and joined ranks with folks who were leading this charge, it was because I was so thoroughly discouraged by the realm of health information technology for physicians and hospitals and disappointed with both the vendors of electronic health record technology and most of their customers. I saw what was happening on the consumer and patient side of health IT as leapfrogging over the tired, staid, and expensive proprietary client-server apps that were about the only thing in that marketplace. Health 2.0 was an extension ...

“Viewpoints” | The Spread of Obesity in Developing and Transitional Countries

By: Lisa Pawloski

Obesity is increasingly becoming an epidemic in industrialized nations, particularly in the U.S. where one out of every three adults is obese. However, the U.S. is not alone in this emerging public health crisis. Increasingly, transitional nations – which have long fought to simply maintain adequate nutrition among their populations – are being forced to confront a rising tide of obesity among certain sectors of their populations.     I became interested in the rise of obesity in developing and transitional countries during my doctoral work at Indiana University. I was trained as ...

Special Contributor | Will Nutrition Labels on Menus Make America Healthy, Wealthy, and Svelte?

By: Joanne Kenen

One perverse side effect of the stalled national health reform legislation is that popular, commonsense provisions tucked in the bills get stuck too. That includes the restaurant menu labeling requirement, which has support from Democrats; Republicans; the public health community; and, more recently, even the fast-food industry. I got sort of partial to this rule myself, particularly after I started writing about this topic and did a little online nutritional sleuthing about what I grab for lunch on busy days and what I feed my kids on road trips to the ...