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The Sitting Disease: health is growing at SXSW

If it’s March, it must be time for South by Southwest (SXSW), the annual conference weaving music, film and interactive tracks of speakers and conferees that overcrowds and excites Austin, Texas, with a cool vibe and even cooler ideas. I’ll be participating on Sunday 10 March 2013 at 5 pm on a panel, Sitting Will Kill You: Can Mobile Save Us?, featuring Fran Melmed, developer of the HotSeat app that nudges us to all Get Up Offa Our Things when living our typical sedentary lives; Peter Katzmarzyk, public health researcher who knows all about the relationship between too much sitting

 

Improving health care through Big Data: a meeting of the minds at SAS

Some 500 data analytics gurus representing the health care ecosystem including hospitals, physician practices, life science companies, academia and consulting came together on the lush campus of SAS in Cary, North Carolina, this week to discuss how Big Data could solve health care’s Triple Aim, as coined by keynote speaker Dr. Donald Berwick: improve the care experience, improve health outcomes, and reduce costs. Before Dr. Berwick, appointed as President Obama’s first head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Clayton Christensen of the Harvard Business School, godfather of the theory of disruptive innovation in business, spokee about his journey

 

Affluent boomers worry about health costs in retirement

Affluent Baby Boomers in the U.S. foresee a retirement with a more active lifestyle, with a better standard of living and engagement in work. 1 in 4 see continuing their education or learning a new trade, and 1 in 5 anticipate starting or furthering their business. These aspirations are tempered with many financial concerns — top among them being rising health care costs and expenses (a concern for 2 in 3 affluent Boomers), and ensuring that retirement assets will last throughout their lifetime (a worry among 1 in 2 Boomers). Merrill Lynch surveyed affluent U.S. adults on their retirement concerns

 

Innovation will turbocharge health globally and locally – the GE Global Innovation Barometer

While innovation, writ large, is an engine for economic growth, it’s especially going to positively impact many aspects of health and health care, based on GE’s Global Innovation Barometer 2011. To prep for this week’s meeting of thought leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, GE surveyed 1,000 senior business executives in 12 countries in December 2010 and January 2011. Execs were surveyed from 12 countries including Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, S. Korea, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Sweden and the U.S. While execs agree that virtually all aspects of citizens’ lives will be positively improved by innovation over