July 2011 Archive - Penn Medicine News Blog

For many people, a typical day includes waking up, having breakfast, going to work, coming home, having dinner, and going to sleep. Sometimes, if we're being good, we'll sneak in a workout. But then again, most of us aren't studying medicine abroad in Gabarone, Botswana! Perelman School of Medicine student...

Experts from the Penn Memory Center are back from the 2011 Alzheimer’s Association International Conference, held in Paris, where they presented new data and discussed the ongoing challenges in Alzheimer’s diagnosis, treatment and care and some of the ethical struggles associated with newly developed tests to predict and diagnose the disease.

Within hours of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' announcement that they planned to use a group of "mystery shoppers" to study access to primary care across the country, outcry erupted among physicians who felt the study was deceptive and unfair. "Snooping," some called it. A poor use of tax dollars, others said. Days later, the department announced they were putting the effort, which would have surveyed more than 4,000 physicians in nine states, on hold. This week in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Karin Rhodes, an emergency physician and health care policy researcher here at Penn's Perelman School of Medicine -- herself an expert in studies designed using the "secret shopper" method -- responds to the outcry in a "Perspective" piece aimed at taking the so-called "mystery" out of these studies.

In a third post documenting her trip with the Botswana-UPenn Partnership, Hayley Goldbach details her busy schedule in Bots! Week 1 Update Hayley Goldbach Apologies for my radio silence as I adjusted to life here in Bots. Part of it is that I have so much to say that the...

A group of Penn Medicine researchers is set to save lives with cell phones cameras -- and they're challenging the public to help. The MyHeartMap Challenge, a contest that will launch this fall, is sending thousands of Philadelphians to the streets to locate as many automated external defibrillators (AEDs) as they can find.

In a second post documenting her trip with the Botswana-UPenn Partnership, Perelman School of Medicine student Hayley Goldbach lets us know she has arrived safe and sound in Botswana...minus a few issues getting out of the United States! Hayley Goldbach Just wanted to let everyone know that I safe, sound,...