Our Special Licensing shop (which licenses certified professional midwives) went live with a new Midwife Electronic Reporting Utility last week…providing a secure online application for submission and viewing of midwife reports. Our certified professional midwives can now use the electronic reporting tool and our Midwife Survey Reporting Guide to track outcomes. The new web utility provides [...]
On January 1 we’ll begin accepting applications for a new class of health care institution called counseling facilities. New Rules (adopted this week) provide facilities a way to become licensed for counseling services. The new rules will allow the facility to be stand-alone (doing all administrative activities itself) or to be affiliated with another counseling [...]
Service capacity increases mandated by the Arnold v. Sarn lawsuit are on target. The exit agreement on the suit stipulates an increase of services for folks living with a serious mental illness in Maricopa County during fiscal years 2015-2016. Mercy Maricopa Integrated Care (the regional behavioral health authority for Maricopa County) is on target in [...]
The mind and body aren’t separated - and neither should the healthcare delivery system - especially for folks with a serious mental illness. People with a serious mental illness die more than 25 years earlier than the general population…an unacceptable health disparity in anybody’s book. The increased mortality is largely from treatable medical conditions caused [...]
Every year the CDC evaluates each of the states on their public health preparedness performance. Arizona continued to score high marks on this year’s preparedness report card. We got a perfect score this year for biological laboratory testing, and we’ve kept our excellent performance measures for incident management, medical countermeasures, and public information. Our response [...]
Arizona uses a Certificate of Necessity (CON) system to regulate ground ambulance service in Arizona - and to make sure that every place in the State has adequate emergency medical services, including the frontier parts of Arizona. The CON actually describes the geographic service area, level of service (advanced life support or basic life support), [...]
American Medical Response’s (AMR) isn’t the only application in the pipeline. A number of fire departments along with private groups are applying for CONs right now. Some are farther along in the application process than others. Why all the interest in running an ambulance company? Rural Metro’s bankruptcy has probably played a role along with [...]
We expect to see flu cases, hospitalizations, and even some deaths every year, but recent data from the CDC shows that this season may be a little different than the past few flu seasons. First, the flu strain causing the most cases so far this year is Influenza A (H3N2). Flu seasons in which H3 [...]
Childhood immunizations are widely credited as one of the top ten public health achievements of the 20th century. For the 13 diseases included on the current U.S. childhood immunization schedule, 20 million cases of disease are prevented per year, 42,000 lives are saved, and the healthcare system realizes $13.6 million in direct medical costs (see [...]
Good oral health is critical to a person’s overall health. Tooth decay and gum disease are linked with heart disease, stroke and diabetes, and premature births. Many people in our community can’t afford dental care, so they suffer from poor oral health that affects their ability to speak, smile, smell, taste, touch and eat. That’s [...]
