Bana Jobe

Some people go to great lengths to avoid an ambulance ride, from taking an Uber to the hospital to driving themselves to the emergency room, broken bones and all. With all the horror stories of people owing thousands after getting emergency transport, it’s easy to see why: The cost of an ambulance ride isn’t always consistent or clearly defined, so you don’t really know how much you’ll pay until you get the bill. And it can be a lot.

Your support system can help reduce your stress as you manage the disease, as well as give you a group to lean on during tough times and celebrate with when you reach a goal.
What about family or friends?

America has a drugged driving problem. With results in five minutes, this handheld oral fluid drug test could be the answer.

Pardon the pun, but your shoulders tend to "shoulder" a lot of responsibilities. They help you lift, lower, turn, twist and move your upper torso in all directions — and it's in large part thanks to the muscles between the shoulders and the shoulder blades. So when they're hurting, it makes a big impact.

You usually have to dip into your wallet to see the doctor, but with most insurance plans — including any you buy on the Marketplace — there’s one thing that’s totally covered: preventive health care. But which services does that actually include?

From a clinician's perspective, monitoring tools each serve a critical purpose and report important and consistent details about a patient’s real-time progress and response to interventions. But from a patient’s perspective, they’re merely medical machines that hum in the background and contribute to a more sensory and emotionally-tinged experience—one that, without compassionate care, may very often be tantamount to sensory overload.

As telehealth benefits for minor injuries or illnesses continue to become a staple of strong company benefits packages, there’s one other area of care that deserves to go digital: mental health services.

When he’s not involved in cardiac catheterization and coronary angioplasty procedures as an interventional cardiologist, Dr. James Tcheng might be spotted in front of a computer. It’s there that he tools around with code and programming to engineer something functional, operationally sound, and downright fascinating.

Suffice it to say, physicians are busy. So busy, in fact, that physician burnout has become the new hot-ticket term of 2019—part of a bigger, broader category of workplace burnout that now has a designated spot on the WHO’s International Classification of Diseases. So how will they ever find ramp-up time for tech rollouts?

By 2020, 4 in 10 workers will be freelancers, contractors or part-time workers, according to an Intuit report. But with that flexibility comes a steep price: How will they find (and afford) health insurance?

Underinsurance makes it hard to afford normal health care costs, not just big-ticket items like surgeries, procedures or major health conditions. Little things, from prescriptions and doctors’ visits, factor in as well. The costs of all these health needs, even if they’re relatively minor, can keep you from getting the care you need to stay healthy.

While you can’t prevent every mishap, you can plan for them. A well-thought-out plan can minimize the stress of medical emergency cases and (if you’re smart about it) save money, too.

Hospitals are a cacophony of noise—a sensory overload of beeps, buzzes, rings, alerts and sirens that too often, create alarm fatigue and a detrimental hit to a system’s Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) scores. Secure texting, like that within the MH-CURE® Platform, can streamline communications to help clinicians work together in a smarter way, without such a frenzy of sound or risk for medical errors.

With AI at the helm, patients can benefit from a more streamlined experience, an advantage made all the more meaningful for those in underserved communities.

Health care technology is getting smarter by the day. Google can detect cancer. Robots can perform surgery. And in the latest medical marvel, Amazon’s Alexa has all but donned scrubs to assist patients straight from their hospital rooms.