Rocky Mountain Highs and Lows: Efforts to Improve Health and Reduce Costs in Denver

In late May–early June 2011, the Forum sponsored a site visit to Denver, Colorado, to observe innovative efforts to improve the health of Coloradans and reduce the cost of health care. The three-day agenda was designed to convey the breadth and interconnectedness of the efforts underway in Denver and to highlight both successes and challenges. The exploration concentrated on how three themes of national interest are unfolding in Denver: building and sustaining a robust and effective safety net in an evolving health care market; improving the health of people and their communities to prevent and reduce the need for health care; and interprofessional education, training, and practice to foster the development of the teams of health professionals envisioned for the future. The site visit also examined the intersections among and disconnects between these critical aspects of a comprehensive approach to a healthy city. The agenda included visits to several communities in the Denver Metro Area; a variety of health care delivery sites ranging from a small school-based clinic to a large academic medical center under expansion; and the new interprofessional Anschutz Medical Campus which houses the University of Colorado schools of medicine, nursing, dentistry, pharmacy, and public health. The agenda also included several panels convened in the hotel and at various other sites

Resilience and Renaissance: Efforts to Rebuild a Healthier New Orleans

The National Health Policy Forum sponsored a site visit to New Orleans, Louisiana, in May 2009 to explore the city\u27s health challenges, which are similar to those faced by other cities but were all greatly exacerbated by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. The agenda focused on three themes: primary care and behavioral health services availability and access, public health preparedness, and rebuilding healthier communities. It examined how these themes and others intersect in two distinct communities within New Orleans: the Holy Cross community surrounding the Lower Ninth Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development and the community surrounding the Mary Queen of Viet Nam Community Development Corporation in New Orleans East. The agenda also included several panels convened in the hotel and on site, as well as visits to sites in the Bywater and Algiers neighborhoods, highlighting success stories as well as remaining challenges. Site visit participants learned about ongoing struggles to recover and rebuild after the disaster, efforts to improve preparedness for future public health threats, the continuing challenge to coordinate among providers to reorient the health care system away from centralized inpatient care and toward community-based primary care, and multifaceted, community-led initiatives to rebuild stronger, safer, healthier communities

Size-Reduced Basis Set Calculation of Accurate Isotropic Nuclear Magnetic Shieldings Using CTOCD-GRRO and GPRO Methods in Amino Acids and Oligopeptides

The origin-independent magnetically induced CTOCD-GRRO and-GPRO (after continuous transformation of the origin of the current density-gradient of p and gradient of a power of p) current densities are shown to vary linearly with respect to their own defining a and fi parameters. The same is reflected in the connected magnetic properties, in particular the magnetic shielding. This is exploited to find values for a and fi that, using small basis sets, provide isotropic nuclear magnetic shieldings matching an accurate prediction, chosen as the complete basis set limit. An application to the 20 naturally occurring amino acids shows that different nuclei require different values of the parameters, which have been determined at the BHandHLYP/6-31+G(d,p) level with or without consideration of diversified chemical environments. Using CTOCD-GRRO and-GPRO methods, equipped with the optimized parameters at this low-cost level of calculation, 1H, 13C, 15N, and 17O magnetic shielding constants in glutathione, ophthalmic acid, and thyrotropin-releasing hormone are predicted with nearly the same accuracy as that of much more expensive calculations