Transforming Healthcare Delivery

Dr. Clay Marsh

On Thursday, February 2, 2012 the annual TechColumbus Innovation Awards will showcase central Ohio’s many achievements by honoring its top innovators.  It is a night of networking, prestige, and celebration.  Winners in 13 award categories will be announced to an audience of 1,100+ attendees. Under the executive leadership of Dr. Clay Marsh, Ohio State’s Center for Personalized Health Care is a semi-finalist in the Innovation in Non-Profit Service Delivery category.

CPHC was selected for its novel approach to transforming healthcare delivery from its current reactive mode of sick care, to a more proactive one that makes health care more predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory – P4 Medicine. The future of medicine focuses on creating systems and processes to deliver key evidence-based practices and to stratify individuals into smaller precise populations to deliver these key interventions. The goal of P4 Medicine is to reduce healthcare costs, improve outcomes and deliver higher quality health care to patients. It embraces the interface between an individual’s unique DNA, environment and behavior to choose the right intervention at the right time for the right person. P4 Medicine utilizes advances in genomics and molecular diagnostics discoveries to provide predictive information that is necessary to tailor, or personalize, disease management approaches for each individual. Ohio State’s Medical Center is pioneering the advancement of P4 Medicine to improve people’s lives.

The TechColumbus Innovation Awards celebrate the spirit of innovation by recognizing outstanding technology achievements in central Ohio.  This prestigious evening showcases the region’s advancements and promising future.  For more information, visit: www.techcolumbusinnovationawards.org.

What does the innovation of healthcare mean to you?

10 Ways to Add Steps in Your Day

1.  Take the stairs rather than the elevator/escalator, especially for one to three floors, both up and down.

2.  During TV commercials, get up and walk around the house.

3.  Return the shopping cart all the way into the store after grocery shopping.

4.  Marching Minutes – every 30 minutes get up from your desk or chair and do 1-5 minutes of walking in place and stretching your arms, shoulders and neck.

5.  Before eating lunch, take a 10 minute walking break.

6.  If you take your kids to sports or activities, dedicate 10-20 minutes of that time to walking around after dropping them off or when you arrive early to pick them up.

7.  Park in the far back of the parking lot and walk further to the door or get off the bus a stop or two before your usual stop and walk the rest of the way.

8.  Never drive through – get out and park and walk into the bank or fast food stop instead.

9.  When people stop to talk with you, make it a moving meeting and walk around together while chatting.

10.  When making a phone call, stand up and pace around as you talk. Or, rather than phone call or email, walk to a coworker’s office or neighbor’s house and talk to them live.

Nothing will work unless you do.

-John Wooden

Combat Cough, Cold with FastCare Clinics

Al Teets, CNP

Combat cough and cold with these helpful tips from Al Teets, CNP with FastCare Clinics!

1. Wash your hands

2. Drink plenty of fluids

3. Rest

4. Eat a well balanced diet

5. Avoid crowds

According to Al, being sensible is key!

And if you do start to experience symptoms, FastCare is available evening and weekend hours with no appointment necessary.

Living P4 Medicine

Watch these videos to see how our employees having been living P4 Medicine in 2011. Then share with us in the comments below how your New Year’s resolution might incorporate P4 medicine. Do you plan to lose weight? Review your family’s medical history? Get tested? Educate yourself? We want to know your goals so we can share content around those topics in 2012.

I’ll just have a taste…

How can you eat healthier this holiday season? Angela Blackstone, RD, LD, at The Ohio State University Medical Center’s Center for Wellness and Prevention suggests having just a taste of your favorite holiday treats. Here is her guide to help you:

• One bite of cookie dough – 50 calories
• One fingerful of fudge batter – 50 calories
• One tablespoon of frosting – 60 calories
• 15 broken cracker pieces that are suitable for serving company – 135 calories
• One handful of peanuts – 225 calories
• One glass of eggnog (6oz) – 300 calories
• One handful of cereal party mix – 200 calories
• One deviled egg (1-half) – 75 calories
• Nibbling on holiday cookies – 100-150 calories (medium-sized cookie)
• One small candy cane - 25 calories
• One piece of fruitcake - 300 calories

What’s your favorite holiday treat?

Share with us in the comments below.

Tips for a Stress-free Holiday from Ohio State’s STAR Program

Special thanks to Dr. Ken Yeager from The OSU Stress, Trauma and Resilience (STAR) Program for providing his insight with tips to help us stay stress free this holiday season.

• Take time to breathe. If we don’t remember to breathe we can get overwhelmed during the holidays. This can raise stress and tension, increase cortisol levels and heart rate, cause GI disturbances and have a number of other negative consequences to our wellbeing.

• Adjust your expectations. Much of the stress around the holidays comes from the expectations we assume our families place on us. Let go of self-imposed expectations and be wise with how you invest your energies around relatives.

• Simplify your meals. If paper plates make your life easier, use them. Christmas dinner doesn’t have to be served on fine china. The strongest memories people often have of their childhood Christmas’ are the simple foods that mom made, not extravagant dishes that take a lot of time and energy.

• Take time to remember. For some, the stress of the holidays comes from the pain thinking about lost loved ones. Dr. Yeager suggests telling stories about loved ones so their memory can live on. Lighting candles or taking wreathes to their graves are just a couple of the ways families can remember those are no longer physically with them.

• Give gifts from the heart. Don’t make yourself more stressed out by budgeting more than you can afford for holiday gifts. The art of giving is about knowing someone’s unique likes, not about how many presents you can afford to purchase. If you have a large family to buy for, consider adopting the tradition of a gift lottery, where everyone gets one gift and the emphasis is placed on celebrating the family.

• Pace yourself. Online shopping and extended hours can help you avoid hustle and bustle associated with shopping around the holidays. Don’t stay on your feet too long. Even if you are hosting the party, take time to enjoy your friends and family.

Still feeling stressed out? Remember to get enough sleep, be careful with your amount of alcohol consumption and remember to take time to enjoy those around you. The holidays should be about fun.

Learn more about OSU’s Star Program:

10 Tips for Eating Healthy During the Holidays

1. Don’t skip meals during the holidays.  Going hungry only makes you susceptible to temptation (a.k.a. overeating!).

2. Have some ready excuses for the host who pushes drinks or more food.  Such as, “Thank you, but everything was so delicious I am stuffed.”

3. Remember, alcohol is very high in calories.  Try mineral water or club soda with a twist of lime instead.

4.  Look over a buffet table first, step away, and then preplan what you will eat.

5.  Decide how you want to spend your calories.  Enjoy your holiday favorites in moderation and skip those foods you can have anytime in the year or don’t really love.

6.  Write down EVERYTHING you eat.

7.  Focus on the other aspects of the season, not just the food.

8.  Be specific and make an eating plan before holiday parties.  If you have a plan on how to handle the situation, it is much easier to cope with temptation.

9.  Keep tempting holiday foods out of sight, in an out-of-the-way place in your home/work environment.

10. If you are bringing a food to a party, take something you would like to eat that is low in calories.

Thanks to Angela Blackstone, RD, LD, at The Ohio State University Medical Center’s Center for Wellness and Prevention for submitting these tips.

Ohio State Receives NHLBI Award for Arrhythmia Research

Peter J. Mohler, Ph.D.

Researchers at the Ohio State University Medical Center have received a $1.9 million grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) to identify the mechanisms responsible for potentially fatal cardiac arrhythmias in humans. Peter Mohler, director of Ohio State’s Dorothy M. Davis Heart and Lung Research Institute, will lead a team of researchers who will focus on understanding how genetic and acquired defects in the pathways responsible for normal function and electrical activity result in instability in the heart. Researchers will study the role of two different pathways in the heart, ankyrins and EHD proteins, both of which seem unusually disrupted in human disease. Additional Ohio State researchers include Thomas Hund, Jerry Curran, Jingdong Li, Faith Kline, Patrick Wright and Sean DeGrande.