There are a lot of reasons why we believe the stealth interventions will produce longer-term, more sustained effects that are of a greater magnitude than other strategies that have been tried in the past.

From: "Stealthy leads to healthy in effort to improve diet, study shows." Via @physorg.

Patients who have been the victim of an adverse medical event will now have a new way to share the details of their experiences, according to the Empowered Patient Coalition. The San Francisco-based not-for-profit group, in collaboration with the Austin, Texas-based Consumers Union Safe Patient Project, has released a 40-question online survey that patients can use to report on their perspectives of incidents of medical harm.

The survey prompts respondents to provide the details of the incident including the state where it occurred, the type of provider involved, contributing factors, whether they considered litigation and providers' response following the event. Patients have the option of submitting the surveys anonymously.

Patients can also choose from several checklists to indicate the procedure or treatment that was associated with the adverse event. For instance, in the section of the survey related to surgical errors or complications, the respondent can check boxes to indicate “wrong-site surgery” or “post-operative complication.” There are also fields to provide details about healthcare-associated infections, falls, adverse medication events and other types of incidents.

“In the aftermath of such an adverse medical event, patients and their loved ones often have a strong need to share information about their experience,” the coalition said in a news release. “In the United States and Canada, there is no comprehensive system in place to capture and disseminate information on adverse events, and patients often feel excluded and unheard.”

In addition to providing a forum for patients who have experienced medical harm, the coalition also plans to aggregate the data and use it to analyze patterns that could lead to adverse events, according to the release.

From: "HITS - Modern Healthcare's daily IT e-newsletter."

The Consumers Union Safe Patient Project could be the start of a very interesting workaround for a lack of cohesive national, public variance reporting.

However, the "considered litigation" factor worries me a bit; will we see lawyers logging in and using the public database (if it's ever open) to find potential clients and suggest suits?

Even though patients and their families can leave responses anonymously, it will be interesting to see if early responders choose this option, or whether a culture of anonymity emerges.

The early community on Quora.com for example encouraged self-identification, but in the last few weeks a greater percentage of both questions and individuals posting answers choose to be 'anonymous' rather than to self-identify.

In the hospital where I served as a Patient Advocate and often filed variances in the ED, we *could* submit variances anonymously but were encouraged not to do so...the CQI root cause analysis tended to be more complete when as much information about the event and participants as it was possible to obtain, including names, was entered.

The Empowered Patient Coalition is new to me, but I'll be making friends in short order.

I'm especially interested in their goal of building a thorough adverse event database and where they hold and aggregate the data and analyze patterns.

A few questions...

1. Do they plan to release the data to the public?
2. What do they gain from building this body of data about adverse events? Do they plan to become a consulting body for hospitals and other organizations about CQI?

We'll see. This is one to watch.

But looks like a daily focus on sleep, talk therapy (BST anyone?) and personal growth workshops - along with small acts of microfitness - pack a powerful combo punch in fighting depression.

Amazing community-sourced research @accarmichael - and thanks for sharing it in a visualization where the import's easy to grasp.

U.S. and Swedish scientists say they've discovered tiny bits of genetic material known as microRNAs can move from one cell to another.

MicroRNAs were first characterized during the early 1990s as regulating the activity of genes within cells. Now researchers at the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy, in collaboration with the Universities of Helsinki and Uppsala, have shown microRNAs can move from one cell to another to send signals that influence gene expression

on a broader scale.

The scientists said they made the discovery while investigating the intricate details of plant root development in Arabidopsis, a highly studied mustard plant. Although the researchers haven't determined how the microRNAs travel, they said it appears the mobility allows them to play an important developmental role in sharpening the boundaries that define one plant tissue from another.

"To our knowledge, this is the first solid evidence that microRNAs can move from one cell to another," Professor Philip Benfey, director of the Duke IGSP Center for Systems Biology, said.

The finding adds microRNAs to the list of mobile molecules -- including hormones, proteins and other forms of small RNA -- that allow essential communication between cells in the process of organ development.

RNA is where it's at...(or, at least, where it's heading).

From: "Study shows micro-rna's can move - UPI.com."

Why am I working so hard/fast/furious on Contagion and Get Up and Move?

Because, after some crazy group of folks saves healthcare, someone has to focus the genomics sect on something other than RNA therapies.

My next startup will work with practical applications of the RNA-centric genoanthropology theory.

I love startup Halcyon Molecular, but until someone has the microscopy to show us RNA action/movement in real time, we won't really know what we're missing.

DNA molecules are the cars on the highway, but RNA are the drivers.

There are two types of people: those that talk the talk and those that walk the walk. People who walk the walk sometimes talk the talk but most times they don't talk at all, 'cause they walkin'. Now, people who talk the talk, when it comes time for them to walk the walk, you know what they do? They talk people like me into walkin' for them.

From "Hustle & Flow."

Lesson of the day: Walk the walk. Then, don't let yourself get talked into walking someone ELSE's walk. (Harder than it sounds).