Patient credentialing as a population health management strategy: a diabetes case study.

When given the opportunity to become actively involved in the decision-making process, patients can positively impact their health outcomes. Understanding how to empower patients to become informed consumers of health care services is an important strategy for addressing disparities and variability in care. Patient credentialing identifies people who have a certain diagnosis and have achieved certain levels of competency in understanding and managing their disease.

Integrating pharmacists into diverse diabetes care teams: implementation tactics from Project IMPACT: Diabetes.

Objective: To describe local implementation tactics used by the 25 Project

Impact: Diabetes communities and partnering organizations to help patients who are disproportionately affected by diabetes.

Setting: Care was delivered in 25 communities within 17 states at federally qualified health centers, community pharmacies, free clinics, employer work sites, medical clinics, physician offices, and other settings.

Practice Description: In addition to pharmacists, practices included physicians, nurse practitioners, dietitians, physician assistants, social workers, behavioral therapists, and other types of health professionals.

Improving outcomes for diverse populations disproportionately affected by diabetes: final results of Project IMPACT: Diabetes.

Objective: To improve key indicators of diabetes care by expanding a proven community-based model of care throughout high-risk areas in the United States.

Design: Observational, multisite, pre-post comparison study.

Setting: Federally qualified health centers, free clinics, employer worksites, community pharmacies, departments of health, physician offices, and other care facilities in 25 communities in 17 states from June 2011 through January 2013.

The universal condition: medical constructions of 'congenital phimosis' in twentieth century New Zealand and their implications for child rearing.

'Congenital phimosis' was one of a number of pseudo-pathologies that entered mainstream medicine in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century Truby King, Henry Jellett, and Eric Corkill advocated premature foreskin retraction as the first intervention to manage 'congenital phimosis'. If that failed they recommended circumcision, although eventually it became more expedient to use circumcision exclusively.

Tom Tiddler's Ground: Irregular Medical Practitioners and Male Sexual Problems in New Zealand, 1858-1908.

Irregular practitioners (‘quacks’) specialising in male sexual problems succeeded in nineteenth-century New Zealand by taking advantage of the growing population of unattached men who were ignorant of their own sexual physiology. The irregulars also profited from the regular practitioners’ acceptance of ill-defined or imaginary male sexual disorders and the side effects of conventional venereal disease treatments, the lack of a clear demarcation between quacks and the regular medical profession, and an increased availability of newspaper advertising. Improvements in the postal system enabled quacks to reach more potential customers by mail, their preferred sales method.

Behavioural consequences of child abuse.

Objective: To discuss the consequences of abuse on childhood behavioural development, to highlight some behavioural clues that might alert physicians to ongoing child abuse, and to explore the specific role of the family physician in this clinical situation.

Sources Of Information: A systematic search was used to review relevant research, clinical review articles, and child protection agency websites.

Main Message: A child's behaviour is an outward manifestation of inner stability and security.

Overexpression of the 78-kDa glucose-regulated protein/immunoglobulin-binding protein (GRP78/BiP) inhibits tissue factor procoagulant activity.

Previous studies have demonstrated that overexpression of GRP78/BiP, an endoplasmic reticulum (ER)-resident molecular chaperone, in mammalian cells inhibits the secretion of specific coagulation factors. However, the effects of GRP78/BiP on activation of the coagulation cascade leading to thrombin generation are not known. In this study, we examined whether GRP78/BiP overexpression mediates cell surface thrombin generation in a human bladder cancer cell line T24/83 having prothrombotic characteristics.