HIV/AIDS Video to Screen at APHA Conference

Description: Zablocki VA Women's Health PACT (Patient Aligned Care Team includes the MD's, NP, RN, LPN, social worker, PharmD and medical secretary) undertook a pilot study to increase HIV testing among women clinic patients.

About the Project

This animated layered painting is the result of a 3-month design collaboration between PhD Design students, Amanda Geppert and Cornelia Bailey at Chicago’s IIT Institute Design and Kathryn Havens, the physician director of the Women’s Health Pact team at the Zablocki VA in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The design challenge: How to integrate routine HIV testing in VA Women’s Health Clinics using the Patient Aligned Care Teams (PACT) model.

The video will be screened in November as part of the 141st APHA Annual Meeting & Exposition which attracts more than 13,000 national and international physicians, administrators, nurses, educators, researchers, epidemiologists, and related health specialists. 

The American Public Health Association (APHA) is the oldest and most diverse organization of public health professionals in the world and has been working to improve public health since 1872. The Association aims to protect all Americans, their families and their communities from preventable, serious health threats and strives to assure community-based health promotion and disease prevention activities and preventive health services are universally accessible in the United States. APHA represents a broad array of health professionals and others who care about their own health and the health of their communities.

The PACT team was fortunate to have design researchers who helped to identify key elements for diffusion of our results.

The Zablocki Milwaukee VA Women's health team in collaboration with the IIT Institute of Design team sought to increase HIV testing among women veterans.

Together they identified a relatively simple process change in workflow wherein the LPN obtains consent for HIV testing at the same time that standard panels for cholesterol, blood sugar are offered, thus decreasing the stigma traditionally associated with HIV testing.

This process change ensures that patients are consistently offered the test, an important factor for women who may be infected with HIV but have no discernable high-risk behavior, since her risk may be related to her partner's behavior and not her own.

Early detection of HIV means effective treatment as a chronic disease.

Design methods were applied vigorously, not only for data collection, but also for intentional team building. The integration of design methods and medicine not only led to the creation of an impactful video solution but also to a short, simple and compelling way to disseminate findings with other VA medical providers.

Since its completion, the video has been placed on the national HIV VA site.

The story and video was presented to VA national champions throughout the entire country for implementation by other PACT teams.

Alphachimp @ TEDx Nashville

See more graphic recording from the event on Flickr: images | slideshow

While our visual compatriots Sunni Brown, Austin Kleon and David Gray were cavorting with the SXSW Interactive crowd, we had the honor of providing visual capture for this inaugural TEDx Nashville event focused on the future of health care.

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23 & Me & Mr. Chimp

Like my daughters, like my mom--even like you!--I share a vast amount of DNA with the chimps, apes, and bananas. The consumer genetics testing company 23 & Me has a great Flash animation introduction to genetics.

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Sons Of Lwala: A Documentary of Hope

Milton and Fred Ochieng’ are two brothers from Kenya whose village sent them to America to become doctors. But after losing both parents to AIDS they are left with a heartbreaking task: to return home and finish the health clinic their father started before getting sick.

Unable to raise enough money on their own, the brothers are joined by students, politicians, and a rock band who launch a fund raising drive among young people across the United States. Sons of Lwala follows Milton and Fred on their incredible journey as they find a way, despite all odds, to open their village’s first hospital.

From Project Sunshine:

Amid all the stories that have hit the news about Kenya in the recent weeks, the story of the sons of Lwala has to be told, and what a better way to tell this story than through a film. So, for those of you in the Nashville, TN area or in front of a computer, you are welcome to donate and/or buy tickets for a benefit screening of the story of the two young doctors who returned to Lwala to build a hospital after being educated in the United States

How To Take Action

After Fred and Milton completed the hospital, with the help of well wishers and friends, they realised that they needed to keep it open, and created the Lwala Community Alliance to continue funding the initial donation.

Filmmaker Barry Simmons says via the team’s Facebook page:

It’s time (finally!) to celebrate the completion of our little documentary, and more importantly, to gather around Milton and Fred for a blow-out night at TPAC to raise money for their clinic in Lwala! The screening will be in Nashville on Thursday, March 27. Order tickets at www.tpac.org/lwala.

And just in case you are wondering what your donation will do:

So folks, you can watch the trailer here or the trailer below.

Just When I Thought Pro-Wrestling was Awesome

This just in...

"Teens who watch wrestling take more health risks"

clipped from www.reuters.com Teenage fans of TV wrestling are more likely than their peers to be aggressive or take chances with their health, a study suggests. Researchers found that among 2,300 16- to 20-year-old Americans, those who watched professional wrestling were more likely to be violent, smoke or have unprotected sex -- and the more they watched TV wrestling, the greater their odds of taking such risks. The findings, reported in the Southern Medical Journal, do not prove that watching wrestling alters young people's behavior. "It may be the case that kids who have a personality that leads them to be aggressive also gravitate to watching wrestling on TV," noted Dr. Mark Wolfson, one of the researchers on the study and an associate professor at Wake-Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Of the teenagers in their survey, just over 22 percent of males said they had watched pro wrestling in the past two weeks, as did 14 percent of females.

Ready to Ware

Clothes That Look Hip and Track Your Vital Signs, Too

clipped from www.wired.com De Rossi, who has worked on robotic skin and motion-capture tech for Darpa and the US National Institutes of Health, began exploring the idea of fabric as a data-collection medium 12 years ago. Most of his designs employ thin, pliable strands of conductive steel spun with cotton or polyester fibers into yarn. The Wealthy suit has nine electrodes and conductive leads woven in, yet the fabric looks and feels completely normal. The challenge in incorporating sensors into clothing — even skin-tight unitards — is that the fabric shifts when the body moves, resulting in sloppy, irregular signals. To deal with this, De Rossi's team developed software algorithms to clean up the data, along with code to reconstruct the wearer's movements. These programs are the real genius behind the company's work. "Even when you are sick, if you have something that doesn't look nice, you don't want to put it on."

Freelancers Need Universal Health Care Too

Words By Daniel Brook | Illustrations By Ted McGrath

clipped from www.goodmagazine.com As heartening as it is to see universal health care back on the national agenda, it’s puzzling that when the presidential candidates talk about their health-care proposals, they only talk about poor kids and Wal-Mart workers. This doesn’t square with my experience of the health-care crisis. I know plenty of people who are sweating health-care coverage. None of them are poor kids. And they don’t work at Wal-Mart. The people I know who are worried sick about coverage work for themselves, many in creative fields. Most of these freelancers and entrepreneurs are in the cross hairs of our health-care crisis—and you wouldn’t know it from watching the presidential campaign. As a freelance writer, I buy my own insurance. My premium went up 25 percent this year and I didn’t even get the pleasure of taking up smoking or skydiving. FULL ARTICLE >>

The Most Innovative Ways to Nap

My favorite activity synergized with funky furniture and gadgetry!

clipped from www.fastcompany.com With increasing awareness about the health benefits of sleep, napping is becoming both more popular and more acceptable -- not just on college campuses. The opportunity to cater to this trend has caught the attention of entrepreneurs, and in recent years, there has been a slew of new products and services that facilitate napping. Here are some of the most interesting ways to catch a few reinvigorating minutes of rest when you can’t just jump into bed.

One of the technologies, is a iTunes-like music streamer that uses an algorithm to combine music, words and rhythms.

pzizz is a mac and windows software application that generates random soundtracks which help you regain your energy. pzizz currently sports two modules: energizer and sleep. The service uses Neuro Linguistic Programming to achieve optimal brainwave action.

Neuro Linguistic Programming is defined as the influence of language patterns on the brain. It shows us how language patterns program our minds and form our views.

NLP is a system in which the brain is viewed as a computer that can be reprogrammed to think and feel in a way that helps people achieve specific goals.

Race in a Bottle

Drugmakers are eager to develop medicines targeted at ethnic groups, but so far they have made poor choices based on unsound science. By Jonathan Kahn

clipped from sciam.com Two years ago, on June 23, 2005, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first “ethnic” drug. Called BiDil (pronounced “bye-dill”), it was intended to treat congestive heart failure—the progressive weakening of the heart muscle to the point where it can no longer pump blood efficiently—in African-Americans only. The approval was widely declared to be a significant step toward a new era of personalized medicine, an era in which pharmaceuticals would be specifically designed to work with an individual’s particular genetic makeup. Known as pharmacogenomics, this approach to drug development promises to reduce the cost and increase the safety and efficacy of new therapies. BiDil was also hailed as a means to improve the health of African-Americans, a community woefully underserved by the U.S. medical establishment. Organizations such as the Association of Black Cardiologists and the Congressional Black Caucus strongly supported the drug’s approval.