Health

Medicare uses geographic adjustments to pay more in areas deemed to have higher costs of providing care to seniors. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services employs a patchwork of 89 pay locales to set rates in a budget-neutral environment. As a result, a doctor treating a Medicare patient...

A new study shows that people who have had a head injury and have lived or worked near areas where the pesticide paraquat was used may be three times more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease. The study is published in the November 13, 2012, print issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of...

The bottom line from a Penn State nutrition study (that included GIS): The combination of being less sensitive to a bitter-tasting compound and having limited access to healthy nutritious foods strongly influences a child's risk of being obese.  Researchers determined food likes and...

New York-based startup Context Matters’ cloud-based, risk-management tool provides a global picture of each country’s reimbursement agency decisions for drugs treating 35 conditions. The data is updated on a monthly basis so the information doesn’t get stale. Yin Ho, the founder and CEO of...

Millions of cellphone users in Kenya are helping the fight against malaria. In the Oct. 12 issue of the journal Science, scientists report using cellphone location data to create a map of "sources" and "sinks" of malaria, which could lead to better-focused efforts against the mosquitoes that...

The Community Liveability Guide has been developed by Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in partnership with the Qld Department of Communities, Council of the Ageing Queensland (COTAQ) and Gold Coast City Council and is available on http://www.cotaq.org.au/index.php The guide give...

A new study out of Toronto published online in the journal Diabetes Care inversely links walkable cities and diabetes. Researchers at St. Michael's Hospital and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences examined data from more than one million residents of Toronto and concluded that...

The State Health Access and Data Assistance Center maps out the change in insurance rates, between 2011 and 2012. Only seven states saw a statistically significant decline in the uninsured rate. Two, New Hampshire and Colorado, actually saw their uninsured rates go up. - SHADAC via WaPo...

The U.S. Census Bureau has a new interactive online program that shows health insurance coverage as of 2010 for the nation's 3,140 counties. In general, an interactive map on the site, http://www.census.gov/did/www/sahie/index.html, shows that the South and West have a greater percentage...

Saline County [MO] Assessor Margaret Pond said the assessor's office is six years behind on its mapping. E911 Director Stacie Smith and GIS Technician Brandon Wolfe provided a plan to unclog and update the system. Smith estimates the county will pay $11,632.50 for the system clean up. The...