By many accounts, the United States’ healthcare system is among the most advanced in the world. We have launched countless innovative technologies, life-changing medical devices and equipment, and our healthcare providers are consistently and successfully treating highly complex and rare diseases. Such innovation comes at a cost, however, and sometimes it’s questionable as to whether or not we are seeing a return on our investment.

If you are planning on volunteering at or donating food to a food bank, food pantry, or soup kitchen this Thanksgiving, Healthify encourages you to take a moment to think about those whom you are helping. If the people you are helping are food insecure during one of America’s most bounteous holidays, how do they fare for the rest of the year?

Queers all over the place are dynamic communities that reinvent ways of living. Varying gender and sexual identities tends to be the number one thought that comes to mind when people outside the community think of us. Our diversity of identity is fantastic but so is our diversity of economy. This post is about the queer sharing economy. 

Healthify is pleased to announce the launch of The Medi Community Resource Center at the Medi Medical Neighborhood Forums. The Medi CRC is a nonprofit virtual support center that has partnered with Healthify to “Wire the Neighborhood” for community referrals and greater care coordination. The event will be held December 2, 2015 in Baltimore at the University of Maryland BioPark to celebrate the launch of the CRC in Maryland.

Every emergency department has experienced the ‘frequent flyer’ phenomenon—cases where patients become repeat visitors because they are chronically ill, seek medical attention, and lack access to other types of care. In a sense, emergency departments were designed to treat a patient’s current condition, not the cause. In the case of America’s frequent fliers, addressing the symptom is the solution to improving long-term health and better outcomes.

Medicine’s march of forward progress seems hard to deny. In the past century alone, the US has seen the elimination or eradication of smallpox, malaria, and polio. And the rush of medical miracles doesn’t seem to be slowing, either, with new cures and treatments regularly making headlines. But the big question behind a dropping mortality rate is, “For whom?” How you slice your demographics is going to have a huge impact on your headlines. This week’s demographic shocker comes from Nobel laureate Angus Deaton and Anne Case, who released a report showing that middle-aged white Americans are facing rising death rates.

Technology in healthcare leaves a lot to be desired, a desire held by both patient and provider. Providers utilize numerous electronic medical record systems with onerous user interfaces that slow down the clinical work flow. This sometimes results in less-than-stellar coordinated patient care.

Last week’s story on processed meats causing cancer was an Internet motherlode. The story spread like a grease fire, combining the Internet’s national cuisine (bacon) with its national pastime (fear-mongering). As is often the case with a scientific report’s introduction to the mainstream, the WHO’s largely calm and collected statements – “eating red meat has not yet been established as a cause of cancer” – were contorted into headlines about how bacon will kill you. It’s the kind of news that, for the most part, people pass around on Thursday morning and forget about by Friday afternoon, just in time for them to drink their carcinogenic alcohol, smoke their carcinogenic cigarettes, and frolic in their carcinogenic sunshine.

Last month, the Obama administration announced that they are taking steps to combat America’s newest epidemic: opioid addiction. During an impassioned speech at a community forum in Charleston, West Virginia, an area at the center of the America’s opiate crisis, President Obama outlined new policies to both reduce prescriptions of opiate painkillers, a precursor for most drug abuse, and increase access to drug treatment.