Late Friday Post. Some News Items

Late. The internet service provider failed to exceed the Disease Management Care Blog’s customer expectations today.

Since the DMCB can't quite get to turning off the computer on this Friday afternoon, briefly:

In a prior post, I announced that Vince Kuraitis and I had presented a Webinar on the Patient Centered Medical Home. You can get a summary and a copy of the slides we used at Vince's most excellent e-CareManagement blog.

Speaking of presentations, the DMCB had the pleasure of talking about “Primary Care, Populations and Educators: What You Need to Know” at the annual American Association of Diabetes Educators (AADE) meeting in Washington DC. This was a huge meeting that filled the Washington DC Convention Center. Very impressed with the infectious energy and enthusiasm, DMCB came away with new insights that it’s saving for a future post. If the United States can channel the common sense and ‘can-do’ spirit of this community of professionals, the cost and quality challenges of diabetes can only improve.

Bob Wachter has a July 25 posting over at The Health Care Blog that echoes the DMCB’s prior comments on the emergence of efficient on-line reporting of scientific results versus traditional paper journals and their information monopoly, hidebound review processes and unfair copyrighting. No skepticism here.

Members of the disease management community are well aware of Dr. David Nash and successes of the Department of Health Policy at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. In recognition of the Department’s considerable accomplishments and the growing visibility as well as importance of population-based health care, the Department has been elevated to School status. Congratulations to Dr. Nash, his colleagues and to the arrival of even more scientifically rigorous and academic disease management. We are all off better for it.

The DMCB confesses to a morbid interest in the recent we-may-have-a-culprit news in the Anthrax attacks. Mainstream print and radio reports may taste great, but the prize for the most filling and complete information fix goes to Barbara Martin’s review of the evidence in this post at Pathophila. SNR markers, types of envelopes, two-not-one spore batches and the likelihood of intentional sabotage certainly put a new light on the assertion of some that the case is not ironclad. The DMCB suspects a jury of scientists would have voted to convict.

And last but not least, you think that because you spend a lot of time on the phone that you're skilled at managing all those buttons? Think again. The DMCB hopes this is not a video of a DM call center nurse with too much down time.