Reducing Unnecessary Primary Care Use: Less is Really More

Source: JAMA Internal Medicine What is this about? This edition of Connections provides a recently published article that gives us a practical and systematic methodology and set of recommendations to reduce low value or “unnecessary” adult primary care use.  The article contains a test of more than 409 specific recommendations representing 178 unique opportunities to… Continue Reading ›

A Lifetime of Resilience: Cigna 2020 U.S. Report

Source: Cigna What is this about? This edition of Connections provides a recently released, very useful, 80-page report on the level of resilience among U.S children and youth, their parents and the U.S. workforce.  The effects of COVID-19 on the resilience of both populations are included and the report uses a survey methodology to establish… Continue Reading ›

Infographic on Mental Health Issues from COVID-19

Source: National Institute of Health Care Management (NIHCM) What is this about? This edition of Connections provides a very useful summary infographic on the effects of COVID-19 on the mental health of American workers.  It comes from a think tank funded primarily by the Blues. (NIHCM) The data insights provided in this infographic give tangible… Continue Reading ›

Wellness Programming after COVID-19

What is this about? The document in this edition of Connections is the latest Solution Set and addresses options and alternatives for how wellness professionals might modify their programs after COVID-19.  A summary of current research on COVID-19 is provided along with an overall assessment of the “big picture.” A concluding excerpt is reproduced below.… Continue Reading ›

27% of All Health Costs Preventable

Source: Lancet Public Health What is this about? The document highlighted in this edition of the Connections newsletter is a newly published study from the British Journal Lancet Public Health.  The article reports on an extensive modifiable health risk analysis of U.S.health care costs using a cross-comparison technique on two very extensive claims databases.  The… Continue Reading ›

Average Costs of Health Conditions

Source: JAMA What is this about? The document in this edition of Connections is a comprehensive 22-page article from JAMA that provides a great deal of health care cost summary information for the period 1996 to 2016 and a great look at condition-specific average cost information and patterns that can be linked back to targeted wellness program interventions. … Continue Reading ›

Healthy Life Years Gained from a Healthy Lifestyle

What is this about? The document in this edition of Connections is a recent article from the British Medical Journal that uses 2 major American long-term epidemiological studies (The Nurses’ Health Study – N= 73,196 and the Health Professions Follow-up Study – N= 33, 366).  These 2 landmark prospective cohort studies are used in this study… Continue Reading ›

Employee Wellness Programming after COVID-19

What is this about? The document in this edition of Connections is the latest Solution Set and addresses options and alternatives for how wellness professionals might modify their programs after COVID-19.  A summary of current research on COVID-19 is provided along with an overall assessment of the “big picture.” A concluding excerpt is reproduced below.… Continue Reading ›

Clinical Treatment Guidelines for COVID-19

Source: National Institutes of Health (NIH) and New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) What is this about? The 4-month-old COVID-19 Pandemic has directly affected virtually everyone in the world. The absence of science-based, consensus-mediated, clinical guidelines for its treatment has been a sore point with front line practitioners.  Now we have two major candidates for that definitive treatment… Continue Reading ›

Personally Navigating the Coronavirus Pandemic

What is this about? I know we are all pretty sick of the word “Coronavirus”, but this edition’s document was too good to pass up.  The Wall Street Journal did an excellent 8-page special section on Navigating the Coronavirus that everybody needs to read.  The practical and thoughtful advice presented here is extremely useful. Why is… Continue Reading ›