Industry Insights

"Population Health -Creating a Culture of Wellness"  (http://www.amazon.com/Population-Health-Creating-Culture-Wellness/dp/076378043X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1298394113&sr=8-1)  is a new book that provides a comprehensive overview of the issues involved in understanding and managing the health of large groups of people.  Coauthored by David Nash, Dean of Thomas Jefferson University's School of Population Health, the book is separated into section

Atul Gawande, the author of "The Checklist Manifesto" and "Better", has an interesting article in the January 24 issue of The New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/24/110124fa_fact_gawande) on efforts to target healthcare services to the small number of patients who consume the greatest amount of healthcare resources.  These patients, often having multiple chronic diseases, often slip through the cracks of the conventional healthcare system and end up usi

Let's suppose you've been tasked with a project that requires dealing with a significant amount of data.  Perhaps you're analyzing changes in the demographics of patients using hospital services over the last three years, analyzing the results of your cost accounting system, or investigating various characteristics of bad debt claims.  All of these would require working with large volumes of data that would tax the abilities of most spreadsheets.  In your heart you know that you need a true database system to handle this data, but know that there is no way th