Celebrating National Payroll Week
As one of the largest departments in Arizona State Government, ADHS is joining in the salute to payroll professionals by participating in National Payroll Week. National Payroll Week recognizes professionals who support the American system by not only processing your wages, but also reporting your earnings and withholding employment taxes, which keep America running. Our payroll department is staffed with a small but [...]
Making the Healthy Choice the Easy Choice
Arizona is focused on making affordable fruits and vegetables easy-to-find in communities throughout the state. In Arizona, more than 40% of Farmers’ Markets accept Arizona Farmer's Market Nutrition Program coupons so WIC moms and seniors on the Commodity Supplemental Food Program can purchase fruits and vegetables at Farmers’ Markets, compared to just 21% of the Farmers’ Markets across the US [...]
September is Suicide Prevention Month
In 2012, more than 1,000 Arizonans took their own lives, including more than 200 folks who had served in the military. Suicide influences populations differently. Nationally, the group committing suicide in the greatest numbers is elderly men. In Arizona, we also have a high rate among American Indians. Additionally, those with a serious mental illness are 12-15 times more likely [...]
Arizona Community Profiles Dashboard (Part I of IV)
We collect all kinds of surveillance about prevalence of disease, birth, causes of death, reasons for hospital visits, smoking rates and hundreds of other indicators to help us assess health indicators and design interventions to improve outcomes. For the first time ever, we now have a tool to explore this data and visualize it in several different ways. Our new [...]
e-Book Edition of the “Guide to Clinical Preventive Services”
For the first time, the US Preventive Services Task Force has released an e-book version of its Guide to Clinical Preventive Services which helps primary care clinicians and patients decide together what preventive services are right for a patient’s needs. The 2014 Guide includes all active Task Force evidence-based recommendations including 28 new and updated recommendations since the 2012 version. [...]
Vital Records Quality Improvement Team Gets Impressive Results
Our Vital Records team handles more than 600 mail-in requests for birth and death certificates each week. The average wait time for mail-in certificates had been nearly 4 weeks...too slow in anybody’s book. Last month we established a cross-functional quality improvement team to find and implement ways to reduce the turnaround time. We now have some great results to show [...]