HEALTHY ONLINE

Wanted: White knight (shiny amour optional) to save us from ourselves and the wretched lifestyles we choose. Your coffeemaker went dead on you this morning, and while lamenting your drowsiness at work, your friend Denise mentions that she just bought a new coffeemaker at Target and she absolutely loves it. You take your coffee the same way Denise does, black, strong, and all day long, so you decide to buy one for yourself. You are a busy professional and you don’t have time to go to Target, search for a good parking spot, walk to the store, walk around until you find the small appliances, pick it up, stand in line, walk back to the car, struggle to back out from the too narrow parking space, and drive home through congested intersections. It could easily take half an hour out of your already busy day. So you decide to buy it online in the evening. You get home, feed the kids, answer a couple of urgent emails from your boss, and after everybody goes to bed, you settle down to finish tho

There is a new report out from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) titled “ The Slow Recovery of the Labor Market ”, and as its title implies, it predicts a slow recovery from a labor perspective. Among other things, the CBO report is now making headlines in the political game of Obamacare because it forecasts a 2.5 million job reduction by 2024 due to the effects of the health care law. You should read the report itself (it’s not very long and it has lots of pictures), because it is practically impossible to find objective coverage of its contents in today’s media, which is full of ideology driven experts and completely devoid of old school reporters. I don’t know about you, but I for one am growing tired of the incessant drumroll crediting or blaming Obamacare for everything from the price of gas at the pump to the demise of penguins in Argentina, so let’s show some magnanimity and absolve Obamacare from, at least, the following 10 naturally occurring phenomena. Number 10: The CBO

Meaningful Use Stage 2 is now on the clock. Three years after the program began in 2011, and a year later than originally planned, the escalator has finally moved up one level. Surprisingly, the usually boisterous and highly hyped health information technology (HIT) media is largely silent on the subject. It’s almost like everybody gave up, or perhaps the entire Meaningful Use exercise is now assumed, and the buzz has shifted to sophisticated analytic apps, preferably mobile, that will utilize all the big data collected by EHRs to perform medical or fiscal miracles. Of course, the best engineered and the sleekest looking Ferrari cannot run without fuel, and since Meaningful Use participation is the fuel for all the cutting edge innovation floating around in the intelligent apps market, it may be useful to take a quick look at the Meaningful Use state of affairs for 2014. Let’s get some numbers laid out first, so we can have an informed discussion. According to CMS , back in 2011, the f