“
Commuting Hurts Productivity and Your Best Talent Suffers Most” is not only the title of an article from
Harvard Business School but also an important consideration as society readjusts post-pandemic, even if slowly, from working at home to returning to the office.
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COVID’s Challenge and Corry’s Comeback
While all communities felt the stresses of the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly 60 U.S. communities implementing a large-scale population health initiative demonstrated resilience across many measures.
The city of Corry, Pennsylvania, offers an illustrative example. Highmark, AHN Saint Vincent, LECOM Health, Corry Memorial Hospital, and UPMC partnered with Erie County government and launched a community well-being partnership with Blue Zones Project by Sharecare (BZP) in 2019. Before anyone knew a once-in-a-century pandemic was about to change life in the U.S., the conditions for a living experiment in resilience were created.
Topics: Bulletin Corry
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The Well-Being Impacts of Poverty and Wealth
Poverty exacerbates sickness, and wealth protects well-being—two sides of the same coin viewed from opposite sides.
“
Association of Wealth with Longevity in U.S. Adults at Midlife” published last month in JAMA confirms higher net worth by midlife had significantly lower mortality risk over the subsequent 24 years.
Topics: Bulletin
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Adopting best practices from trusted sources can prevent unnecessary COVID-19 deaths
Learning from others is a fundamental strategy inculcated early in life and fundamental for survival. Oppositional behavior sometimes creeps in and can either be innovative, yielding new and better methods or counter-productive, creating distressful and worse outcomes. The evolutionary advantage is to differentiate quickly and follow the better path.
Topics: Bulletin
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Economic Security Underpins SDOH
Poverty, the bottom line or commonality among the social determinants of health (SDoH), was underscored last month in a
New England Journal of Medicine Perspective, “
Medical-Financial Partnerships—Beyond Traditional Boundaries.”
“Financial well-being, measured using various metrics, affects nearly every health indicator, from birth weight to longevity. Income is perhaps the most obvious financial metric linked to health. The richest 1% of people in the United States live 10 and 14 years longer (for women and men, respectively) than the poorest 1%.”
Topics: Bulletin
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Transferring hospital marketing dollars to prevention for long-term benefit
Does advertising by hospitals and healthcare systems have any relationship to quality? This question was answered in a
Journal of the American Medical Association article last month. The unsettling conclusion stated:
Topics: Bulletin
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U.S. Congress Launches Social Determinants of Health Caucus
Help is on the way: the Congressional Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) Caucus was formed earlier this month to “
explore opportunities to improve the impact of services delivered to address social determinants with the support of federal funding. It will work to amplify evidence-based approaches to holistic well-being.”
Topics: Bulletin
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Historical public health innovations and SDOH
Pandemics are not new, nor is society’s attention to the social determinants of health. Fortunately, science has progressed, bringing public health measures including infection control, appropriate sanitation, wholesome environments, and most recently, the miracle of effective vaccines to society in record time.
Topics: Bulletin
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Engage in a healthy lifestyle and decrease your change of a dread disease
Cancer, a dread disease, is somewhat preventable. Healthy habits, careful vigilance, and good care including new therapeutics make a significant difference, as noted in a National Institute of Health and
National Cancer Institute report released last week.
Topics: Bulletin
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"Healthy Multipliers" can change the course of health and well-being
Aspiring to health and wellness rather than turning to sickness and healthcare is beneficial in at least two ways—avoiding both the misery and the expense of disease. A
Journal of the American Medical Association statistical analysis published last month, entitled “
Social Determinants of Health and Geographic Variation in Medicare per Beneficiary Spending,” addressed this thesis by comparing the Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) with the cost per Medicare fee-for-service enrollee within 3,038 counties. About 100 counties’ populations were too small or did not have data and therefore were excluded.
