Quoted Text

HealthWatcher automates sending those easy-to-forget reminders to your patients with medical advice and health care best practices

Providing sound health maintenance means including a full array of counseling, screening, and other preventive services designed to minimize the risk of premature sickness and death and to assure optimal physical, mental, and emotional health throughout the natural lifecycle. Today's leading EHR systems offer a wide variety of electronic health record (eHealth or EHR) features to optimize workflow and patient safety. For example, screening tests and physician counseling are important tools for identifying common yet potentially serious injuries, illnesses and diseases that can be prevented or cured with early intervention.

EHR Helps Obtain Successful Health Compliance Outcomes

EHR (eHealth) provides you the tools for successful management of patient populations, conditions, and preventive health routines ensuring patient compliance and preventive care. The HealthWatcher tool allows for customized profiles and protocols to ensure your practice complies with best practices and your patients adhere to your medical advice.

eHealth Maintenance Tailored to Your Practice Needs

With ADP AdvancedMD EHR, you can tailor your health maintenance solution to fit the unique needs of different groups of patients. For example, you can customize health maintenance information by diagnosis or by payer to accommodate carrier guidelines. Find out how ADP AdvancedMD can help your support staff quickly identify and reach out to patients who are due for tests or procedures.

Utilize Continuity of Care Protocols for Better Safety, Health Maintenance & Compliance
Our HealthWatcher (eHealth maintenance) module is part of our EHR and is a tool that helps the practice and provider follow continuity of care protocols. We support care plans, guidelines and protocols for the management of specific conditions based on factors such as age, sex, diagnosis and lab result values.

Benefits of HealthWatcher Maintenance in the EHR
Generates alerts for appointment recall, prescription refills and laboratory orders
Protocols can contain one or a series of tasks, renewable based on user-defined intervals
Health maintenance protocols can be assigned to an individual or group of patients

Quoted Text

EHR (eHealth) provides you the tools for successful management of patient populations, conditions, and preventive health routines ensuring patient compliance and preventive care. The HealthWatcher tool allows for customized profiles and protocols to ensure your practice complies with best practices and your patients adhere to your medical advice.

Quoted Text

Continued Use of ADHD Drugs May Reduce Criminal Behavior, Study Says

Arrests were lower when people with disorder took their medication, Swedish research found

November 21, 2012 RSS Feed  Print

By Serena Gordon
HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, Nov. 21 (HealthDay News) -- For teens and adults who don't grow out of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, staying on ADHD medications may help them stay out of trouble.

Males with ADHD who stayed on medications for the disorder reduced their risk of criminal behavior by 32 percent, while women who did so reduced their rates of criminal behavior by 42 percent, according to a large Swedish study.

"It seems as though ADHD medications decrease the risk for criminality while under treatment," said the study's lead author, Paul Lichtenstein, professor of genetic epidemiology at the Karolinska Institute, in Stockholm.

Results of the study are published in the Nov. 22 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Dr. Andrew Adesman, chief of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Children's Medical Center of New York, in New Hyde Park, said past research has found that adults with ADHD have a "host of increased risks later in life, like driving accidents, losing jobs, divorce and arrests." Adesman said those at greatest risk of criminal behavior are those with hyperactivity.

Adesman added that it's important for parents to know that not all children with ADHD will engage in criminal behavior, and that some children will outgrow ADHD. Still, "collectively, people with ADHD are at risk for a range of poor outcomes," he said.

For the current study, the researchers gathered information on more than 25,000 people living in Sweden with a diagnosis of ADHD. They also collected information on what types of medications were given as treatment, and any criminal convictions that occurred between 2006 and 2009.

Researchers then compared non-medication periods to medication periods and the rates of criminal behavior for each person.

The risk of criminal activity dropped by more than a third for men and women combined during medication periods, according to the study.

Lichtenstein said the researchers didn't study whether medications were more effective in reducing criminal behavior for a particular age group. They also didn't look at whether one type of medication was better at decreasing the risk of criminal activity, but he said those that influence the core symptoms of ADHD -- such as impulsivity, restlessness and irritability -- are likely to be better at reducing criminal behavior.

Lichtenstein said ADHD medications should be seriously considered for adolescents and young adults with ADHD who are at risk for criminal behavior.

"All medications have potential adverse side effects, and the clinician should weigh risks and benefits for each patient," he added. "Now, they should include the potential decreased risk of criminality in that evaluation."

For his part, Adesman said that based on the findings of this study, it looks as though treatment with ADHD medication can make a difference in the risk of criminal behavior. But, he said, it's important to realize that the population in this study isn't the same as the population in the United States, so the findings might be different if the study were done here.

Adesman said it is also important not to "presume that children diagnosed with ADHD today have the same risks of criminality as people diagnosed 20 years ago, given the greater awareness, education resources and support that is available today."

However, he added, "I suspect that symptomatic people probably do better with medications."

Although the study found an association between staying on ADHD medication and reduced criminal behavior, it did not prove a cause-and-effect relationship.

More information

Learn more about the medications used to treat ADHD from the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health.

Copyright © 2012 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Quoted Text

Minority Report has arrived: Maryland and Pennsylvania using computers to predict future crimes
Parole officers use software to decide  level of supervision  for ex-inmates
Uses algorithm devised by American criminology professor Richard Berk
By HARRIET ARKELL
PUBLISHED: 04:35 EST, 11 January 2013 | UPDATED: 06:11 EST, 11 January 2013
Comments (40)
Share
  
Futuristic: Tom Cruise as Chief John Anderton in Minority Report
When police in Minority Report predicted who would commit crimes and stopped them before they did it, it was considered so futuristic, the film was set in 2054.
Now, however, law enforcers in two American states are using crime-prediction software to predict which freed prisoners are most likely to commit murder, and supervising them accordingly.
Instead of relying on parole officers to decide how much supervision inmates will need on the outside by looking at their records, the new system uses a computer algorithm to decide for them.
The Minority Report-style software is already being used in Baltimore and Philadelphia to predict future murderers, and will be extended to Washington D.C. soon.
It has been developed by Professor Richard Berk, a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who believes it will reduce the murder rate and those of other crimes.
Prof. Berk says his algorithm could be used to help set bail amounts and also decide sentences in the future.  It could also be modified to predict lesser crimes.
He told ABC News that currently parole officers are using their own judgment to decide what level of supervision each parolee should have, based on their criminal record.
His software, he said, replaces that 'ad-hoc' decision making, and should identify eight future murderers out of 100.
He said: 'People assume that if someone murdered then they will murder in the future, but what really matters is what that person did as a young individual.

More...
Katie Holmes appears in New York court as man goes on trial for beating his infant daughter to death
Victim, 24, relives horror of 'grappling with knife-wielding schizophrenic woman who pointed 12-inch blade at her chest'
'If they committed armed robbery at age 14, that's a good predictor.
'If they committed the same crime at age 30, that doesn't predict very much.'
Prof. Berk's researchers used the details of more than 60,000 crimes then wrote an algorithm to find the people behind the crimes who were more likely to commit murder when they were out of prison.

Pre-cog: Samantha Morton plays a human who can see into the future in Minority Report

The software predicts future criminals like the 'PreCogs' in the Tom Cruise film who can see crimes not yet committed

Future murderer? Neal McDonough, centre, and Colin Farrell, right, co-starred with Cruise in Minority Report
Criteria including criminal record, type of crime, location, and age at which the individual committed the crime were analysed, with type of crime and age proving to be the most reliable predictors of future crime.
He said even his students at the University of Pennsylvania compared his work to Minority Report, the 2002 film starring Tom Cruise in which gifted humans called 'PreCogs' can see into the future and predict who will commit crimes.
In the film, Cruise plays the elite crime squad head Chief John Anderton, who himself is accused of committing a murder in the future.
Prof. Berk's work has been described as 'very impressive' by Shawn Bushway, a professor of criminal justice at the State University of New York at Albany.
However he cautioned that human rights campaigners might see that the extra supervision mandated by the software for those deemed most likely to murder might amount to harassment.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new.....t.html#ixzz2HnLXq2mp
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook