The Burness Effect Blog

Honoring Our Veterans with Better Skilled Nursing Homes

The Green House ® Project, a grantee of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is focused on reinventing the nursing home experience for older Americans and is taking steps to improve the lives of those who have served our country.

The story is ultimately about shared decision making—a model of care that informs and includes patients in decisions about their care. The takeaway message is clear: by informing patients, we can avoid wide variations in care and ensure that the best choices are made regardless of financial incentives that may exist for the doctor.

Looking Beyond Health Care—the Social Factors That Affect Health

We know that education is important, that a better job and more income can improve our lives, and that living in a neighborhood with sidewalks and grocery stores is convenient. What we don’t often consider is how all of these … Continue reading Looking Beyond Health Care—the Social Factors That Affect Health →

Once I asked a pain expert, “why do you care about pain treatment so much?” The story that followed – about a dying girl writhing in pain who changed the course of his medical career - silenced the room. And then It became the lead to an opinion editorial he published soon after in Toronto’s Globe and Mail. More leaders need to open up and share what drives them day in and day out.

BurnessDigital is new, but we’ve been crafting online strategy for several years: we have told the stories of exceptional nonprofits in videos, brought attention to their ideas with social media campaigns and dynamic websites, and worked to “move the needle” by crafting online strategies that advance their communications goals. This launch is the next step in the evolution of our communications approach.

It’s an unfortunate reality: many Americans see oral health as unnecessary or cosmetic. But oral health is critical to overall health. Though largely ignored in national health reform, oral health is important, and for some—like 12-year old Deamonte Driver who died from an untreated tooth infection—it’s a matter of life and death.

Today at the Federal Reserve in Washington, D.C., a unique event is in progress: leaders from the health, finance and community development sectors are coming together to discuss how their collaboration could help build healthier communities.

In this first-ever issue of a major public health journal devoted to Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander populations, an array of new research highlights alarming disparities.

Confronting America’s Primary Care Shortage

The shortage of primary care providers is well-publicized. But, as studies in the May issue of the health policy journal Health Affairs point out, recruiting more primary care doctors, nurse practitioners, and physician's assistants to fill that void is only part of the solution.

“We have to start seeing health information systems as a mainstream technology that is part and parcel of medical practice, not something that is appended to it as an afterthought, not something that’s imposed on it, but something that will very soon be integrated into it and indistinguishable from all the other work that physicians and other health professionals do every day.”