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Those with occupational therapy jobs Arizona may benefit from a new collaborative healthcare program set up by the federal government.

A new set of regulations issued by the Department of Health and Human Services will not only allow people with Medicare to benefit form Accountable Care Organizations, but allow professionals involved in those organizations to reap a number of benefits.

An Accountable Care Organization is a group of primary care doctors, specialists, hospital workers, and other care providers who work together to improve care for Medicare patients. Employees who opt to become part of an Accountable Care Organization will see increased savings from better coordinated patient care, higher-quality care, and the ability to use healthcare dollars more wisely.

"The Accountable Care Organization model of delivering care may not be right for every doctor, practice, clinic, or hospital, but it adds to the extensive menu of options offered through the Affordable Care Act to provide better health, better care, and lower costs not only for Medicare beneficiaries, but for all Americans," HHS notes.

The new regulations establish a voluntary Medicare Shared Savings Program, which aims to help doctors, hospitals, and other providers improve their ability to coordinate care across different healthcare settings.

Healthcare providers who meet a set of quality standards will be able to share in any resulting savings. The quality measures include: patient experience, care coordination and patient safety, preventive health, and caring for at-risk populations.

Essentially, healthcare providers who offer a greater quality of care will receive greater savings, with the potential to earn up to $940 million in savings over the next four years.

Labels: Occupational therapy jobs Arizona

Those with Arizona nursing jobs (http://azjobs.cancercenter.com) may one day benefit from a new medical study being supported by one of the nation's largest technology companies.

Dell recently announced plans to expand the companies Powering the Possible program to provide funding, employee engagement, and cloud computing technology to support a number of pediatric cancer research programs.

Part of the funding will allow the Translational Genomics Research Institute, the Neuroblastoma and Medulloblastoma Translational Research Consortium, and Van Andel Research Institute to conduct the world's first personalized medicine trial for pediatric cancer.

TGen will use its genomic technology within Dell's cloud to help NMTRC identify a greater depth of personalized treatment strategies for children with neuroblastoma who are already enrolled in an NMTRC clinical trial.

Here are some key facts about neuroblastoma and the funding:

• Neuroblastoma attacks the sympathetic nervous system - which controls heart rate, blood pressure, and digestion - with aggressive tumors unique to each child.
• Neuroblastoma affects one out of every 100,000 children every year and is responsible for one in seven pediatric cancer-related deaths.
• The Food and Drug Administration has only approved one new treatment for childhood cancer since 1980, compared with 50 treatments for adult cancers.
• The new personalized medical trial is mainly being funded by parents of children with neuroblastoma and their foundations.
• The trial hopes to develop "real time" processing of information on patient tumors and predict the best drugs for a specific patient.
• Dell's cloud solution will allow TGen to increase its gene sequencing and analysis capacity by 1,200 percent
• The cloud also will allow for better collaboration among physicians, genetic researchers, pharmacists, and computer scientists working on the trial.
• Finally, the cloud will expand the program's participation from a handful of children today to hundreds of children over the next three years.

"Even at this earliest moment in genomics-guided therapy, there is universal recognition that the amount and complexity of data is overwhelming," Jeffrey M. Trent, Ph.D., president and research director of TGen and VARI, said in a statement.

"Dell's commitment to helping children with cancer, coupled with its expertise in developing cloud-based solutions for health information, will provide great benefit in terms of helping us manage the massively complex data generated by this clinical trial," he continued. "This will help physicians and scientists share information rapidly, and is designed to help us arrive at the optimal treatment decision for each child battling cancer."

Labels: Arizona nursing jobs

Those with non profit jobs are getting some advice on how to bring in more donations.

"Growing Philanthropy in the United States," a new report from Adrian Sargeant and Jen Shang, scholars and teachers at Indiana University, offers a number of ideas on how to increase charitable giving.

During 2010, donations from individual donors increased by 2.7 percent to $212 billion, showing that people were still making contributions despite the down economy. However, that number also is equal to the 40-year average for this figure, which means that giving has essentially remained even over the last several years.

"Encouraging voluntary contributions to fund the work of nonprofits must therefore be a priority," the report notes. "However, the question remains how to best achieve this goal in the face of the stubbornly static  pattern of giving we allude to above. Forty years of increasingly sophisticated fundraising practice, the development of planned giving vehicles, the appearance of the Internet and the rise of new digital channels have done nothing to move the needle on giving."

Here are some suggestions from influential leaders of the nonprofit industry on how to increase charitable giving:

Enhancing the Quality of Donor Relationships

• Redefine relationships from donor relationships to individual relationships.
• Reorient toward longer term measures of fundraising performance.
• Enhance focus on retention and building supporter loyalty.
• Develop a more integrated approach to fundraising.
• Break down organizational silos and encourage greater collaboration between teams.
• Give supporters greater control over the relationship.
• Promote the development of shared back office facilities.
• Tackle high turnover rates in the fundraising profession.
• Educate all stakeholders about the necessity of a longer term and integrated approach.

Developing Public Trust and Confidence in the Sector

• Empower the regulators to enforce 100 percent filing of forms 990 and increase their utility.
• Blow the whistle on organizations claiming to have zero costs of fundraising.
• Fund the development of a website in the U.S. to educate the public, boards, and other stakeholders.
• Encourage nonprofits to develop complaints schemes.
• Fund the development of a website to facilitate peer-to-peer evaluations of nonprofits.
• Develop new and more appropriate measures of performance.
• Develop the self-regulation of fundraising.

Identifying New Audiences, Channels, and Forms of Giving with Strong Potential for Growth

• Encourage the adoption of monthly giving.
• Improve the sector's engagement with young people.
• Encourage and promote best practices in social media.
• Encourage asset-based giving.
• Develop expertise in broadening participation in giving.
• Improve the quality of bequest fundraising practice.
• Challenge the wealthy to plan their own philanthropy.
• Create a nonprofit mutual fund.
• Leveraging companies to promote philanthropy.

Improving the Quality of Fundraising Training and Development

• Invest in the development of fundraising research.
• Create a fundraising research institute.
• Redesign the system of professional development and certification for fundraisers.
• Encourage the development of academic qualifications in fundraising.
• Appoint a "sales force" for the body of fundraising knowledge.
• Call out institutions offering certificates purporting to be qualifications.
• Educate board members about the intricacies of fundraising.

Labels: Non profit jobs