Strategies for healthcare facilities, construction, and real estate management.

Adventist HealthCare offers the following lessons learned in improving the value of healthcare facilities, construction, and real estate management: Use an integrated approach. Ensure that the objectives of the approach align the hospital or health system's mission and values. Embrace innovation.

Starting a medical home: better health at lower cost.

At Adventist HealthCare, a patient-centered medical home pilot project: Helped improve the health of high-risk members while increasing the efficiency of healthcare delivery. Supported the primary care physicians treating the high-risk patients. Reduced the costs of treating the patients.

Simulation game provides financial management training.

Adventist HealthCare developed a workshop with a reality simulation game as an engaging means to teach nonfinancial managers about the relationships between cash flow, income statements, and balance sheets. Thirty AHC staff, about half financial and half nonfinancial, were trained as workshop facilitators, and all managers with budget oversight were asked to complete the workshop. The workshop was very positively received; participants' average scores on workshop questionnaires increased from 77.

Endotoxin exposure in utero increases ethanol consumption in adult male offspring.

Epidemiological studies have suggested that adverse experiences in utero predispose individuals to neurobehavioral disorders including drug abuse in adulthood. The present study was designed to examine the hypothesis that maternal endotoxin exposure during pregnancy increases ethanol consumption in adult offspring. Pregnant Sprague-Dawley rats were subjected to lippopolysaccharide (LPS, 1.