Wellness and Stress Management for Service Industry Employees

The following is a professional and educational experiment project designed to highlight the importance of wellness and self care for service industry employees. This project is an experiment to see what tools we can implement as service industry employees to reduce stress levels and take better care of ourselves, together. I used my own place of work (small town mom and pop business) and encouraged employees to participate in my case study as a means to address their own wellbeing, establish stress reduction techniques, make a positive change within our company’s culture, and create a more supportive work environment. Below I will describe the process of establishing a wellness system and innovative resources for employees to utilize to improve overall well being and performance

Legal Solutions in Health Reform: Insurance Discrimination on the Basis of Health Status: An Overview of Discrimination Practices, Federal Law, and Federal Reform Options

Provides an overview of the insurance industry's discriminatory practices based on health status in designing and administering health insurance and employee health benefit plans. Discusses current federal law and interim and long-term reform options

The Status of Health Information Delivery in the United States: The Role of Libraries in the Complex Health Care Environment

published or submitted for publicatio

Emerging Patient-Driven Health Care Models: An Examination of Health Social Networks, Consumer Personalized Medicine and Quantified Self-Tracking

A new class of patient-driven health care services is emerging to supplement and extend traditional health care delivery models and empower patient self-care. Patient-driven health care can be characterized as having an increased level of information flow, transparency, customization, collaboration and patient choice and responsibility-taking, as well as quantitative, predictive and preventive aspects. The potential exists to both improve traditional health care systems and expand the concept of health care though new services. This paper examines three categories of novel health services: health social networks, consumer personalized medicine and quantified self-tracking

Nano-enabled biosensing systems for intelligent healthcare: towards COVID-19 management

Biosensors are emerging as efficient (sensitive and selective) and affordable analytical diagnostic tools for early-stage disease detection, as required for personalized health wellness management. Low-level detection of a targeted disease biomarker (pM level) has emerged extremely useful to evaluate the progression of disease under therapy. Such collected bioinformatics and its multi-aspects-oriented analytics is in demand to explore the effectiveness of a prescribed treatment, optimize therapy, and correlate biomarker level with disease pathogenesis. Owing to nanotechnology-enabled advancements in sensing unit fabrication, device integration, interfacing, packaging, and sensing performance at point-of-care (POC) has rendered diagnostics according to the requirements of disease management and patient disease profile i.e. in a personalized manner. Efforts are continuously being made to promote the state of art biosensing technology as a next-generation non-invasive disease diagnostics methodology. Keeping this in view, this progressive opinion article describes personalized health care management related analytical tools which can provide access to better health for everyone, with overreaching aim to manage healthy tomorrow timely. Considering accomplishments and predictions, such affordable intelligent diagnostics tools are urgently required to manage COVID-19 pandemic, a life-threatening respiratory infectious disease, where a rapid, selective and sensitive detection of human beta severe acute respiratory system coronavirus (SARS-COoV-2) protein is the key factor

Proceedings of Designing Self-care for Everyday Life. Workshop in conjunction with NordiCHI 2014, 27th October.

Managing chronic conditions can be challenging. People in such conditions, and the people around them, have to, for example: deal with symptoms, adapt to the resulting disability, manage emotions, and change habits to keep the condition under control. Self-care technologies have the potential to support self-care, however they often disregard the complexity of the settings in which they are used and fail to become integrated in everyday life.The present collection of papers forms the Proceedings of the Workshop “Designing Selfcare for Everyday Life” conducted last October 27th, 2014 in Helsinki, where 14 participants from 7 different countries spent the day discussing how to design self-care technologies that are in harmony with people’s everyday life. During the morning, discussions were driven by poster presentations focused on the participants’ work. In the afternoon, we engaged in aparticipatory design exercise focused on the self-care of Parkinson’s disease. Our discussions were driven by the experience of two people living with Parkinson’s that participated in our workshop. At the end of the exercise, each group presented the different insights, concepts and problems that each patient experiences in their everyday life with the disease. Last, we all engaged in a broader discussion with a mapping exercise of issues and challenges in relation to self-care.The contributions featured in the proceedings have been peer-reviewed by the members of the Workshop Program Committee and selected on the basis of their quality, alignment with the workshop theme, and the extent (and diversity) of their backgrounds in design. They express points of view of researchers from both Academia and Industry and provide relevant insights in the design and development use of technologies for self-care.We want to thank all the participants and co-authors for contributing to the Workshop. We are particularly grateful to the two patients, members of the Finnish Parkinson’s Association, who accepted to participate in the workshop and enabled researchers to get aperspective on the challenges of their lives. We also want to thank all the Programme Committee members for all their work during the reviewing process as well as the organisers of NordiCHI 2014 for providing useful facilities

Cashiers' and management's perceptions of the usefulness of EAPs with particular reference to wellness couselling

Thesis (M.A. (Organisational Psychology))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities, School of Human and Community Development, 2016.The purpose of this study was to explore cashiers’ and management’s perceptions of the usefulness of a company-provided employee assistance programme (EAP) with particular reference to wellness counselling. This study focused specifically on the four principles governing EAPs, namely; confidentiality, referral system, helping process and handling of outcome. Fifteen participants were recruited for this study from a cash centre of a financial institution in Johannesburg. There were ten males and five females. A qualitative methodology was used to collect and analyse data. The instruments used to collect data were two participant-generated text schedules, one for cashiers and the other for managers. Data were analysed using thematic content analysis. The results of the study showed that both employees and management found the EAP useful in the workplace. The direction for future research in South Africa could focus on conducting a longitudinal study to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of wellness counsellingMT201

The roadmap to healthcare digitalization: factors that affect the Portuguese approach to ehealth

Healthcare systems worldwide need to improve health outcomes while reducing costs. Increasing demand for chronic disease management, such as pulmonary disease, is driving digital transformation in healthcare. The Kata® inhalation app aims to improve patients' inhalation techniques through a data-based algorithm. This study aims to classify Portugal’s proneness to healthcare digitalization. Specifically, it investigates to which extent Portugal is lagging compared to digital pioneers and how it can keep up with advancements in a rapidly evolving technological world. The results suggest that Portugal is a positive example of eHealth but its main challenges are patients’ low digital trust and inoperability across infrastructures and health subsystems