Health Care: Employers Encourage Healthy Lifestyles with Penalties and Rewards

By Barbara Ficarra, RN, BSN, MPA How do companies curb health care costs? Do healthier employees lead to increased productivity?  Several progressive companies believe so and have committed to providing employees with programs to help engage them in a healthier lifestyle. As part of the incentives to lead a healthier lifestyle some employers have instituted a penalty and reward system tied to the companies’ benefits.  For example, smokers may incur a significant surcharge to the…

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Social Media: Top 5 Useful Health Tweets

By Barbara Ficarra, RN, BSN, MPA Twitter is a powerful form of social media, and it is a phenomenal resource for sharing information.  Twitter can help improve your health. A significant blog on Mashable, “HOW TO: Use Social Media for Better Health” by Ben Parr, he writes that “Healthy living can be a shared experience.” Social media is about connections and information, while healthy living is about consistency and knowledge. Combined, social media can bring…

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Health 2.0 in San Francisco to Offer the Latest in Innovative Health IT, Oct 7-8

Health 2.0 Fall Agenda Announced, Oct 7-8 Guest Post by Matthew Holt This week we’ve announced the line up (or the first chunk of it) for the 4th annual Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco Oct 7-8. The conference is the climax of  Health Innovation Week — a week long series of conferences, meetings, and events highlighting innovation in health care information technology. Health 2.0 will focus on Search & Content, Communities, the Data Utility…

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The Health 2.0 Developer Challenge Wants Innovative Health Care Developers

Guest post by Indu Subaiya and Matthew Holt The Health 2.0 Developer Challenge–It’s On! By Indu Subaiya & Matthew Holt [Original post published on The Health Care Blog July 8, 2010, and reprinted with permission from Matthew Holt.] Today is the formal kick-off of the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge. The challenge was first announced by Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra on June 2 at the Community Health Data Initiative (CHDI) meeting, and it’s partly a continuation…

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Health IT Engages in the World of Health 2.0

By Barbara Ficarra, RN, BSN, MPA Healthin30 begins to delve into the world of Health IT and we’ll bring you the latest innovations in health care technology. In the world of Health 2.0 (“user-generated phenomenon”), co-founder Matthew Holt brilliantly captures the technological geniuses that have created and developed health technologies for providers and patients to help reduce costs and simplify their life. I recently attended the Health 2.0 conference in Washington, D.C. and I was…

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