Thursday, July 25, 2013

Stress: How To Reduce and Find Ways To Cope


Stress is a normal physical response to upsetting or worrisome events. Stress is not always bad if experienced in moderation. It can motivate you to do your best and take action. However, if you are constantly under stress and feel pressured, worried or overwhelmed, it can cause major damage to your health.
Stress manifests itself in many different ways, including restlessness, headaches, heartburn, sleeplessness, increased anger or frustration, change in appetite, irritability, feelings of anxiety, or difficulty concentrating. It can also have detrimental effects on your relationships at home and in the workplace. As you can imagine, alleviating stress, and the symptoms associated with it, can lead to a healthier, happier life.

Ways to Cope
• Express your feelings. Discuss your anxieties with others. Write down your feelings in a journal, or send someone a letter.

• Engage in activities you enjoy. See a movie or listen to music, spend time doing a favorite hobby, or get involved in volunteer work.

• Take time for yourself. You are important so make time for you. Do things that make you happy and spend time with positive happy people.

• Do things to relax your mind. Unwind by reading a book. Try massage therapy or muscle relaxation exercises.

• Get regular exercise. A walk or a trip to the gym can help immensely.

• Seek medical treatment if you are under prolonged stress or you feel you can no longer cope.

How to Reduce Stress in Your Life
Bringing down your stress level will alleviate the symptoms associated with stress. The long term effects of reducing stress will help you live a happier and healthier life.
Lifestyle Choices
Strive to make better decisions that minimize excessive stress.

Manage Your Time
Plan ahead so you don’t feel the last minute pressure to finish projects or deal with stressful situations.

Identify Your Souces of Stress
Determine the situations that cause you the greatest amount of stress and either avoid them or develop coping mechanisms.

Get Support
A strong support network of family and friends who help discuss things that cause you excessive stress can be helpful alleviation.

Talk to a Medical Professional
Consult your physician or a counselor. Don’t hesitate to seek their help.

Healthy Weight: Achieve and Maintain Yours with Nutrition and Exercise


A healthy weight is the weight your body naturally achieves when your physical activities and lifestyle are in balance with the nutritious foods you eat. When the calories you eat match the calories you burn, you will settle into the right weight for you.

Getting to and maintaining your healthy weight means eating a balanced diet with plenty of fruits and vegetables while limiting empty calories (calories from sugary soft drinks, cakes, pies, and other dessert foods) and eating less fat and highly processed foods.

Exercise is also an important component to managing a healthy weight. Exercise moderately at least 30 minutes per day, five or more days per week. Mix up your exercise plan with a brisk walk, cycling, shooting hoops, working out at the gym or engaging in an enjoyable activity that gets your heart beating faster and makes you feel invigorated.

Common Causes of Being Overweight
Many factors in our daily lives that contribute to being overweight. Poor diet and inactivity are commonly recognized, but some medications, medical problems, and excess stress can cause weight gain as well. Other factors also put people at increased risk of becoming overweight, including family history, age (as we age, our metabolism slows) and sex.

Control Your Calories
A calorie is a measurement of the energy your body needs to function. If your body takes in more calories than it needs on a daily basis, it stores the excess as fat. The formula to lose weight, requires you have to use up more calories than you take in. Follow these some tips to help manage your calorie intake:

• Reduce your fat intake. Fat has twice the calories per gram than protein or carbohydrates. Animal foods such as meat and dairy products are a big source of fats.

• Eat complex carbohydrates like those found in whole grains, vegetables, and beans. These are good lower calorie foods that give you nutrients and fiber.

• Drink water in lieu of soft drinks. Simple carbohydrates, such as in soft drinks and sweets are high in calories and provide few nutrients and no fiber.

• Eat frequent, small meals. It is an important diet component that helps you digest foods and keep blood sugar levels stable. It may also lower cholesterol.

Incorporate More Physical Activity into your Life
Prior to beginning any exercise program, always consult your physician first. Then, strive to be active for at least 30 minutes a day through walking, bicycling, or whatever physician approved exercise program works for you. Walking 30 minutes per day as little as 3-4 times per week can improve your health.

The Benefits of Achieving a Healthy Weight
• Reduces risk of heart disease and stroke

• Lessens chance of developing certain kinds of cancer

• Relieves stress on back and joints

• Increases energy level

• Enhances self esteem

Exercise: A Routine for a Feel-Good, Healthy Life

Physical activity is a key to improving your health and preventing serious illness. Exercise helps us feel better, have more energy, and perhaps even live longer. Regard less of age, sex, or physical ability, the benefits of an active lifestyle and exercising regularly are difficult to ignore.

Importance and Benefits of Exercise

• Combats chronic diseases such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and can help you prevent diabetes, osteoporosis and certain types of cancer.

• Contributes to managing a healthy weight which improves your overall health and reduces risk of weight related health problems.

• Strengthens your heart and lungs which improves your cardiovascular health.

• Improves mental well being and can help eliminate stress

• Promotes better sleep so you are well

How to Start Your Exercise Routine
The benefits of establishing an exercise routine are plentiful. Often, the toughest part is getting started. Here are some suggestions to get you off on the right foot:

• Always consult your doctor before starting a program to assure it is safe for you and meets your goals.

• Seek the advice of experts at the YMCA or a local center on the best equipment and how to use safely.

• Make exercise a habit and do it with a family or friend.

• Always start slowly. “Too much too soon,” can lead to soreness, fatigue, and even injuries.

• Set realistic goals. Gradually increase the intensity and duration of your workout.

• Make it simple with walking, swimming, or any enjoyable activity.

• Don’t procrastinate and begin today!

How to Get Results from Your Exercise Routine
Planning your exercise program is a helpful first step. Keep track of how hard you are exercising, what you are doing, and measure the results over time. Here are a few more tips:

• Heart rate. Check your pulse with a stopwatch or an electronic heart monitor. This can tell you if you are working too hard. You should consult with your physician and let him determine your target heart rate and level of exertion.

• Breathing rate. Measuring the number of times you breathe in and out in one minute can tell you how much you are taxing your body. If you can talk while exercising, you are doing fine. If you can sing during exercise you can go a little faster or exercise a little harder. If you can’t talk while exercising you are probably exercising too hard. Slow down a little and build up your stamina over time.

• Weight and fat loss. As your fitness improves, you will be able to become more active and your body will burn more calories. Over time, you will notice a gradual weight loss.

 

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Mollen Launches New Website to Reflect its Healthcare Strategy

Posted by Chris Behling, President at Mollen

Mollen’s new website represents its focus on leveraging its network of healthcare professionals to deliver more care, more conveniently and more cost-effectively.
 
Today, Mollen announced the launch of its new website http://www.MollenHealth.com to better reflect the company’s vision and mission to leverage its network of over 200,000 healthcare professionals to deliver more care, more conveniently and more cost-effectively. 

“Over the past several years, Mollen grew to be the largest mass immunizer in the country.  As a result of that growth, Mollen developed a robust set of assets that can now be leveraged beyond immunizations to extend the reach of providers, expand access to care, help fill gaps in care delivery and provide more care, more locally, by remote healthcare professionals working to the top of their certifications,” said Terrie Robinson, Mollen’s CFO and COO.  “Our new website, URL, branding and logo now represent this vision and mission.” 

Mollen now offers their customers a variety of services including healthcare professionals on a variable cost basis, handling of all workforce management including payroll and contracting, all scheduling and staffing of remote healthcare interventions, training of healthcare professionals on customer specific processes and services, electronic capture of data at the point of care via a fleet of Google Chromebooks, supply chain and logistics capabilities and claims billing and processing.

“Our new streamlined website now focuses on Mollen’s key asset . . . our network of healthcare professionals,” said Marc Crouch, Mollen’s VP of Sales Operations.  “Users can now pick a state and immediately see how many healthcare professionals we have in our network in that state.  Our hope is healthcare service companies and healthcare provider organizations will view Mollen as the best place to access local, experienced and trained healthcare professionals on a variable cost basis to help them deliver services in the most convenient and cost effective ways possible.”

More information is available at http://www.MollenHealth.com.

Take a look at the new website at http://www.MollenHealth.com.

 

Monday, April 22, 2013

Mollen Eliminates 16 Million Pieces of Paper with Chromebooks

Posted by Chris Behling, President at Mollen

Mollen enables clients and patients to access and deliver healthcare services in the most convenient and cost effective ways possible. We do this by leveraging a network of over 200,000 healthcare professionals to deliver services wherever people live, work, play, worship and shop. Mollen is also the the largest independent mass-immunizer in the country and last year we conducted over 100,000 healthcare events across all fifty states.

The healthcare services we provide, typically require a lot of physical documents: in 2011, we used 20 million pieces of paper for everything from patient records to insurance verification to credit card processing. Paper gave everyone problems. It was an imposition on our patients, who had to spend time manually filling out forms, our nurses, because it slowed them down, and finance, because it delayed billing. It was also a drain on the environment.
 
We knew we needed move away from paper and go digital, so we explored a number of different avenues - tablets, laptops and smartphones, among others. Ultimately we decided to go with Chromebooks with 3G, for a number of reasons. The first is security - with the Chrome Management Console, we could centrally configure the devices so they gave users access to just those sites and apps necessary for them to provide services. Second, Chromebooks enabled us to reduce our paper consumption by 80%, while providing our customers better service through a faster digital experience. And third, they’ve speed up our internal processes. Our nurses can now look up a patient’s medical history and determine if they’re eligible and covered for a given procedure, a process that previously would have taken days. And we’re able to accept credit cards and handle insurance billing onsite, ensuring that we’ll get paid for our services.
 
While security and paper reduction were the primary reasons we chose Chromebooks, we realized quickly there were additional benefits. Chromebooks have helped us more easily adhere to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) by using 3G instead of WiFi. Using WiFi would have required us to audit each of the thousands of networks we would have been operating on. Whereas, since 3G’s built in to each Chromebook and communicates with our cellular carrier, Verizon, directly, we didn’t have an additional local area network we needed to audit, saving us time and resources.

By moving to Chromebooks, not only are we able to increase the number of people we’re able to serve, but we’re able to do so better, more securely and at a reduced cost. And by reducing our reliance on paper, we’re happy that we’re helping reduce our environmental impact, as well.




Monday, March 11, 2013

Health Screenings are not a Product

Posted by Chris Behling, President at Mollen

Screenings are not a Product and Health Fairs don’t Work!

It has only been within the past ten years that the biometric screening bandwagon left the station. In the early days, screenings were often offered as a perceived employee benefit and implemented in association with health fairs. The goal of these early screenings seemed to be to raise awareness of health concerns, educate employees about their health plan and other benefits, hand out tchotchkes, and demonstrate that the employer cares. Generally screenings were a “one and done event’” disconnected from any discernible health management strategy. These health fair screenings generated potentially valuable health data that often walked out the cafeteria door with the employee, rarely resulting in interventions to improve the health of the population.

Unfortunately, all too often, this is still the case.

Screenings are not a product. They are not a stand-alone event. They do not, (in and of themselves), improve the health of an employee population. A health fair does not an employee health management program make.

Instead, screenings are an integral and potentially indispensable part of a comprehensive and integrated employee health management process. When implemented as part of an overall health management program, biometric screenings allow employers to:




  • Identify health risks both for individual employees and across the employee population
  • Stratify a population to identify opportunities to improve health while addressing costs
  • Structure benefit plan design to address identified risks
  • Target health interventions to manage and mitigate identified risks
  • Establish a baseline from which improvements can be measured (both individual and group)
  • Tailor health management programs to individual employee needs
  • Provide data to help motivate employees to take appropriate actions to improve their health
  • Identify objective measures upon which incentive programs can be established
Screenings can provide invaluable data and insights that allow employers to implement intervention and incentive strategies to improve the health and well-being of their employees. But the value of screenings is only unlocked when they are integrated into overall health management strategy.
For the past several months, Mollen has been consulting with employers about the appropriate and effective use and implementation of biometric screenings. Mollen is very familiar with different screening approaches and methods including what can be screened, appropriate screening methods, key operational and regulatory considerations and best practices for evaluation and incentives.

Mollen is leading the way in pulling (or pushing) the industry toward the appropriate use of screenings where they are positioned not as a standalone event offered in the cafeteria at the annual health fair, but as the start of an ongoing employee health management process that can meaningfully improve the health of employees while reducing overall healthcare costs.