All Blog Posts Tagged 'health' (128)

The medical device industry changes constantly as new innovations and advancements are made in development, medical IT, and healthcare. Our medical device blog features expertise from the Sterling Medical Devices team and the latest information and regulation changes in the medical device industry that you should be aware of.

The healthcare and wellness industry is shifting toward regulated, personalized,…

Workplace health and well being is a rising public health concern. Poor employee health can be costly to the organization (e.g. absenteeism, poor productivity, reduced attention and workplace safety).

Chronic stress has been shown to impinge decision-making, reduce concentration, immune system responses, and job satisfaction, cause psychological distress (e.g. depression and anxiety) and coronary heart disease, and negatively impact client rapport and personal…

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) is a US legislation that was enacted under the HITECH Act under Bill Clinton’s presidency with the intention of offering safeguards for medical information through its data privacy and security provisions. The Act consists of five sections. Also called titles, they are these:

• HIPAA Health Insurance Reform
• HIPAA Administrative Simplification
• HIPAA…

Healthcare compliance trainings are undertaken to get a clear idea about the regulatory compliance requirements in the industry. Healthcare is a highly regulated industry, which means that the regulatory bodies keep issuing regulatory guidelines, standards or requirements from time to time, as the regulations come in. One question that could arise in the minds of readers is: is it necessary to get trained…

Food inspections occupy a position of primacy among the FDA’s list of mechanisms aimed at maintaining and enhancing food safety. Since it is the sole regulatory body in the US for food, it is natural that the FDA attaches the highest importance to ensuring the safety and efficacy of food that is consumed across the nation.

Towards ensuring this, the FDA has initiated a number of plans and strategies. A seamless, informal and micro level activity in this list is risk-based food…

It is hard to believe that it has been just over since five months since our second son, Lukas, was born on Feb. 3. His mother, Hollyanne, is doing well, which is something to be thankful for, given the excessive maternal mortality rates in the U.S. Lukas is also healthy and growing, albeit sleeping little at night. What is…

A recent admission by The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of the Inspector General of its failure to review required documents for products labeled as “organic” indicates a lack of controls at U.S. borders, increasing the likelihood of nonorganic products entering the U.S. under false “organic” labels.

This opens the floodgates for the entry of dubious products into the market and getting passed off as organic, without being that. In fact, many imported products that carry the…

Shopping for health care is kind of like going to a grocery store where there aren’t any price tags. That jar of spaghetti sauce might cost $4, or maybe $50. But in health care you typically don’t find out prices until you get to the checkout counter. People with one kind of card pay one price, those with another pay a different one, and you may do better or worse if you offer cash.

Last year Montana lawmakers, frustrated by how hard it is…

Hypertension is the silent killer of our times. Over thirty million Americans -one eleventh of the entire country’s population -suffer from this condition. It is rightly termed the silent killer because not only does it not show obvious symptoms; it works silently against the system when it is present. Neglected hypertension is a sure cause for strokes and heart attacks.

There is a highly undesirable, but strong and almost irrefutable link between cardiovascular disease (CVD) and…

Today, we live in an era of customization. Increasingly, customers can modify a product’s appearance, features, or content according to their unique needs or desires. Often, even the news we see in our newsfeeds is customized based off our preferences.

Why, then, are so many aspects of the health care industry still one-size-fits-all?

As doctors, we’ve seen firsthand how this can negatively impact patients who require more individualized care. One particular example…

As health information grows, sharing it among healthcare providers and researchers is necessary for providing and advancing healthcare services and healthcare research. But the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 severely limits how Protected Health Information (PHI) can be shared. It also has restrictions regarding how to protect it…

In a scenario where today’s healthcare environment is fast paced, diverse and straddle many disciplines; retention and disposition of medical records -both paper and electronic -is fraught with complexities. There are different rules set out by the state agencies, as well as by HIPAA statutes and regulations, for the way in which medical records need to be retained…

The introduction of the Electronic Health Record (EHR) has certainly brought about a major change in the way healthcare is administered in this vast country.

EHR's have evolved in a big way from the time they first came to be used in a moderate way in the healthcare industry a few decades ago. From then on, although the push towards making all health records online has been on -and the US economy saves close to $80 billion a year on paper and other aspects -the rate of penetration of…

Food technology has been growing at a quick pace, having come under the influence of the twin paradigms of the late 20^th century, technology and globalization. As populations keep moving from one part of the world to another in the millions; it is natural that they get influenced by the food behavior of the place to which they move, while also bringing their own influences into it.

It is not just with the itinerant population that food service and movement are paired and…