Guest post from Kathryn Wangsness, Chief for the Office of Laboratory Services The Arizona State Public Health Lab is celebrating the dedication of its laboratory personnel next week as part of Laboratory Professionals Week. Laboratory Professionals Week was originally established to honor the more than 300,000 scientists, technicians and pathologists who perform testing vital to [...]
In our April issue of Recovery WORKS you’ll find inspiring recovery stories, behavioral health news, resources, and information from our community. Our featured peer success story this month is about MedHat Zekri, a peer who’s been able to overcome severe depression, anxiety and stress and is being very successful in achieving his life's goals. In our [...]
Last year we created Arizona’s Excellence in Pre-hospital Injury Care project- which is aimed at improving brain injury outcomes in AZ. The National Institutes of Health chose AZ as the only state to evaluate the national standards for pre-hospital emergency care of brain injury. Since we got started about a year ago- we’ve recruited almost 100 [...]
Improving the health of Arizonans is critical to improving the quality of life as well as reducing health care costs. The most effective strategies are ones that incorporate the principles of population health… which includes health outcomes as well as the determinants that influence those outcomes including the public policy that influences the social and environmental [...]
If you’re a regular reader, you know how much value I place on using data to decide if interventions are successful and then sharing successful interventions with others. The way we helped change to hands-only CPR is a great example. We used evidence to craft our intervention (modifying how CPR is done), measured its effectiveness, and [...]
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services released a proposed rule this week establishing proposed “Navigator” standards under the Affordable Care Act. Navigators are organizations that will be providing information to consumers about health insurance, the new Health Insurance Marketplace, qualified health plans, and public programs. In other words, Navigators will be providing assistance to [...]
Medical providers (doctors, nurse practitioners, registered nurses, etc.) are invited to join Magellan for their Driving Suicides to Zero training Monday, April 29 from 9 to 11 a.m. or 1 to 3 p.m. The goal of the training is to help reduce the suicide rate by providing behavioral healthcare professionals with the skills, knowledge, attitudes [...]
We're getting near the end of the long journey of our licensing regulatory reform. Last Wednesday we posted the revised draft rules for Chapter 10 (Health Care Institutions - Licensing) and Chapter 20 (Non-licensing approval). Our goals is to simplify and streamline our rules so they align with our strategic plan and map to improve public health [...]
No doubt you’ve heard the term “population health” bandied about these days… especially as the nation wrestles with finding ways to keep people healthier while decreasing health care costs. But what exactly is population health? At its core, population health examines groups of people, their health outcomes, and the elements that influence those outcomes. Examples of things that influence health [...]
Fifteen years ago The Lancet published a case study that erroneously suggested that there could be a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. That letter has long since been discredited, and back in 2010 The Lancet retracted the article. Anti-vaccine advocates have been pointing to that long-since discredited 1998 case study to argue that there [...]
