The jury is in and unfortunately, the rumors are true: spending too much time on your screens is bad for your health. However, this does not mean that you need to throw away your phone and laptop to live a better life. Quite the contrary, you could even use them to help you have a happier and relatively stress-free one.
The internet is chock full of apps that make your glass screens health-friendly. You just have to know exactly what you’re looking for before you start searching for them. These here are five such types of apps, and why you might need them.
Useful Organization Apps
Most smartphones come with a built-in calendar, notepad, and alarm clock app. Usually crude and basic, these apps usually get the job done whenever you need them. But if you need more functionality, then you might want to download a few other apps.
As such, every phone should have at least a to-do list app and a money management app. In addition to the common function of to-do lists, these apps can usually double as a recurring and editable grocery list, as well. Meanwhile, money management apps track where your spending goes. They can help you track your budget, showing you where you might be overspending and aiding you in making budget plans.
According to research by Ohio State University College of Pharmacy, one in three women and one in five men will experience osteoporotic symptoms over the age of 50 years old. There are currently 200 million people living with osteoporosis, a condition described as an increase in bone fragility or “gradual thinning of the bones” that is normally seen as you age, but is accelerated with those with this bone disease. Although there is currently no available treatment for osteoporosis, new developments in research have revealed breakthroughs in therapeutic methods to approach osteoporosis and other bone diseases.
A new type of bone cell discovered
The research team at Garvan Institute of Medical Research has also discovered a new type of bone cell that may be targeted for the treatment of bone diseases. The newly discovered cells, osteo morphs, were observed to be formed in the process of bone resorption, where specialized cells known as osteoclasts break down old bone and repair it again. Under an intravital imaging technology, researchers observed that osteoclasts break down into smaller cells (osteo morphs) and join together again in the process of bone resorption. A disturbance in this balance can lead to multiple bone diseases such as osteoporosis, which can be prevented with the use of osteoanabolic treatments. In fact, anabolic therapy has been found to slow osteoporosis, according to the National Library of Medicine.
“Completely New Process”
“The process was completely new to us,” said Dr. McDonald, author and leader of the research team at Garvan. They hypothesized that the reason the osteoclasts divide further into osteo morphs and join together again is in order to increase the lifespan of the bone tissue. These cells are also found in the blood and bone marrow, which suggests that they are widely distributed to all parts of the skeleton. It is also likely a reservoir for cells that specialize in repair to be released when needed.
Now that working from home has become the new normal, consistent exercise is more important than ever. Extended isolation may have even caused you to develop some unhealthy habits worth breaking. Spending an excessive amount of time sitting and not exercising is a known contributor to many chronic conditions, such as hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease.
Setting aside time to exercise and get your blood pumping isn’t just a kickstart for physical health. In a period where mental health has likely taken a hit due to isolation, exercise also has tangible benefits on mental health by improving mood and decreasing the prevalence of anxiety and depression symptoms.
If you’re looking for a healthy change, incorporating at-home cardio workouts may be just what you need to get your heart pumping and muscles working. Don’t worry if this is new territory and you’re unsure where to begin. Here are a few ideas to get you started.
Stationary Biking
Biking offers advantages that many other at-home workouts can’t beat. You’re able to get into a rhythmic zone and have a consistently elevated heart rate for an extended period. Comparable to a runner’s high but less stressful on your knees and joints, stationary biking is the gold-standard of at-home cardio. Most machines also have a lower profile than traditional treadmills, saving you some extra space around the house. If you’re looking for a workout that’s more full-body, try opting for an elliptical bike. Rather than targeting primarily lower-body muscles, an elliptical bike involves core and upper-body muscles as well.
By Terrence D. Sims, president of strategic growth and marketing, Raintree Systems.
terrence Sims
As COVID-19 continues to influence patient behaviors and causes providers to reevaluate how they operate their businesses, healthcare practices all around the world started looking for solutions that emphasize clinical efficiencies, elevate patient revenue cycle management, as well as feature enhanced reporting and analytics tools.
More so, along with facing challenges of the patient intake process during a pandemic, providers have also been put to the test with learning how to meet the sudden demand for virtual care by adapting to digital healthcare technologies that utilize high levels of automation, facilitate more patient engagement efforts and focus on financial sustainability.
Security and Compliance
In the world of healthcare, efficiency doesn’t just matter at the surface-level but rather in every individual aspect of treatment whether it be scheduling, reporting or financing. To ensure your EHR can keep up with regular system updates, it should host an educational database that allows providers to quickly train staff as well as give patients easy access to explanatory articles and videos. Having these resources conveniently available will help foster positive patient outcomes and encourage seamless software maintenance.
Additionally, while compliance laws allow for the protection of patients’ health information (PHI) and the overall safety of practice operations, it is also important to understand that cybersecurity is an extremely high priority. Especially now with the shift to a remote workforce, employees at home are much more vulnerable to hackers’ attempts to cease connectivity and override confidential data, making the use of virtual private networks (VPN) and verified firewall software critical to the safeguarding of vital business information.
COVID-19 has brought one major thing into focus for just about everyone on the planet. We learned that we are all interconnected, that one action in one area can quickly turn into a worldwide crisis. We learned that our stories weave together to capture a much broader view of all the diverse factors that impact our health. Not just our physical health, but also our mental health, our emotional health, and our financial health.
As we enter into our second year dealing with this crisis, we continue to struggle with how to bring back some sense of normalcy to our lives. One glimmer of hope is the emergence of a health passport. In a short period of time, we have gone from hardly anyone talking about health passports to it being a very relevant topic as a means to safely open up economies, travel, get our kids back in school, and finally put a lot of the past year behind us.
What exactly is a health passport, also referred to as an immunity pass, vaccine pass, healthpass, health wallet, or a test verification? On the surface, a health passport seems simple enough. It would contain a digital certification documenting if you have been vaccinated against a virus, are currently in an immune state, and/or have recently tested negative for the virus, most notably, the COVID-19 virus. The data is typically presented as a QR code. The pass would be held in a wallet on our smart phone, printedif necessary, or loaded on a smart card.
The travel industry has been leading the charge to implement health passports with the hospitality and entertainment industry not far behind. Many believe this is the only path to reinstating international travel, fully opening up public venues, restarting classroom education, and getting back to normal.
But not everyone agrees.
At a press briefing on Mar. 8, 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO)Executive Director for Health Emergencies Programs, Dr. Michael Ryan, said that there are “real practical and ethical considerations” for countries considering using vaccine certification as a condition for travel, adding the U.N. health agency advises against it now. Theprimary reason is that vaccinations are not available enough around the world and is not available on an equitable basis.
By Cindy Koppen, senior vice president of clinical solutions and chief nursing officer, Banyan Medical Systems.
Cindy Koppen
As healthcare systems become increasingly patient-centric, the nursing profession will no doubt evolve along a similar trajectory. That evolution will inevitably require a reconciliation between a consolidated model for care delivery and some existing functions within nursing that aren’t entirely aligned with the goal of delivering the highest-quality care.
To determine how nursing practices can more wholly align with the future of healthcare delivery methodologies, we must first look at the core function of nurses and chief nursing officers to see where technology can modernize nursing and unlock benefits where they’re needed most.
The primary goal of the CNO is to ensure staff needs are met while creating an engaging, open nursing culture that promotes improved quality outcomes for patients and financial outcomes for the healthcare provider. Hospital technology is a growing part of the CNO’s toolbox because it can support the improvement of clinical and financial performance, identify trends, issues, and developments as they relate to patient care. It can also evenly distribute the nursing workload, improving the work-life balance of nurses and increasing the time available to spend with patients.
Current and Future Nurse Cohort Challenges
Nurse cohorts and staffing concerns are already an issue for many healthcare organizations, but these obstacles will become more challenging as Baby Boomers grow older. A 2017 survey from AMN Healthcare found that 73% of nurses in the Baby Boomer generation were planning to retire in the next three years, and even middle-aged nurses can struggle with the physicality of the work. One 2008 study found that nurses needed to walk as many as five miles during a 10-hour shift, which also constrains time with patients and can make it difficult to deliver the highest-quality care.
In the face of mounting physical demands and less time with patients, it’s no surprise that the oldest and most experienced nurses frequently retire or move to less demanding private clinics, leaving a void that hospitals cannot fill due to the overall nursing shortage.
CNOs Can Support Nurses and Patients With Hospital Technology
Many hospitals are full of state-of-the-art technology, but few of these tools can have as profound an impact as virtual providers. CNOs can augment staff to handle the hands-off aspects of care, relieving some of the strain on on-site nurses by increasing their capacity and more evenly distributing their workloads, freeing up more of their time to focus on hands-on patient care and eliminating the need for end-of-shift overtime.
Virtual nurses are also an excellent source of collaboration and critical thinking skills — resources that directly impact patient outcomes and experiences for the better.
By John Nash, chief marketing and strategy officer, Redpoint Global.
John Nash
The Federal Retail Pharmacy Partnership underscores the status of retail pharmacies as frontline caregiving organizations, often the first point of contact for many healthcare consumers. The federal program, announced in November and activated on Feb. 2, is a partnership between the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and 21 participating retail and independent pharmacies for the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. The partnership covers roughly 60% of pharmacies in the United States, including CVS Health, Walgreens, Costco, Walmart, Rite Aid, Kroger, Publix and Albertsons.
It is not surprising that the government would turn to pharmacies as primary points of care for vaccine distribution. In addition to offering ubiquitous access, retail pharmacies were built to serve micro-market, and ideally individualized consumer needs. With online and mobile app prescription orders, refills, reminders and overall management; drive-through pick-up and on-site urgent care facilities, retail pharmacies are already a first option for many consumers to access and manage healthcare across digital and physical channels.
With vaccine distribution ramping up, pharmacies have a vested interest in creating a compelling vaccination customer experience (CX) to attract new customers, increase customer loyalty or even entice customers to switch preferred pharmacies. This opportunity helps explain the widespread participation, despite pharmacies having to bear administrative and operational costs – such as training costs, a 15-minute required post-vaccine monitoring period for signs of an allergic reaction, or setting pop-up vaccination sites in partnerships with schools, churches or community centers.
Many pharmacies, Walmart included, are launching vaccine drives and community vaccine events specifically chosen to serve at-risk or underserved populations. Others offer drive-through vaccination sites as contact-free options.
Meet Customer Expectations with a Personalized CX
The return for going above and beyond the federal program measures for vaccine distribution – beyond contributing to a healthier population – is a satisfied customer who, the pharmacy hopes, will become a repeat customer, either in-store or through various digital channels.
Vaccinating an at-large population helps advance the cause not only by providing vaccine-eligible customers with a convenient, safe and pleasant experience, but also by receiving a wealth of first-party customer data. In addition to personally identifiable information (PII), vaccinated patients provide pharmacies with a host of behavioral preferences – how they scheduled, notification and channel preferences, and risk tolerance among them.
By using customer data to deliver a hyper-personalized CX, pharmacies will meet or exceed rising consumer expectations for brands to engage customers with a deep, personal understanding across channels. In a 2019 Harris Poll commissioned by Redpoint, 63% of consumers surveyed said that personalization is now a standard service they expect. In addition, 37% of consumers said that they will stop doing business with any company that fails to offer a personalized experience.
When I founded hc1 a decade ago, I believed that every patient should be treated as a unique individual. We built the hc1 Platform because we saw that if every individual’s laboratory data–which drives 70% of the diagnostic and therapeutic decisions–could be organized intelligently, we could unlock an unprecedented level of clinical decision support to personalize and improve care for all patients.
We knew that the platform would effectively lay the foundation for targeted pharmacogenomics and precision prescribing techniques. What we did not know at the time was that the decision to place our stake in the promise of lab insights would ultimately help drive an improved public health response to an unprecedented crisis: the COVID-19 pandemic.
A Coalition Is Born
From the earliest days of the pandemic, demand for greater transparency into COVID-19 data was high while the fluid nature of public health reporting impacted the ability to make well-informed decisions. As a result, local public health and healthcare officials were simultaneously overwhelmed with data and underwhelmed with the timely information and critical insights to help ensure optimal decisions around mitigation strategies.
The reality is that the state and national data relied upon by many public health officials offers limited proactive insight into the ebb and flow of the virus at the state and local levels. This remains as true today as it was in the earliest stages of the pandemic.
Consider the following:
On July 24, 2020, Florida’s statewide COVID-19 cases increased by approximately 10,000. Yet Okaloosa county in Northwest Florida reported just 3 positive new cases that day, while Polk County in central Florida reported 55 and Broward County in Southeast Florida reported 29
On Jan. 29, 2021, California recorded 20,138 new cases. Of those, 6,452 were reported in Los Angeles County. Meanwhile, San Mateo County reported just 277 new cases and Contra Costa County reported just 323.
In both instances, the local response in counties with higher infection rates should be quite different from those with significantly lower rates. Yet without insights offering public health officials a glimpse into the future, the default response was often cookie cutter actions guided by state-level decisions.
