Exchange students visit EHS

EDWARDSVILLE -Edwardsville High School students have had the opportunity to interact with and get to know several students from both China and Germany the past couple of weeks.
                                                     

Fifteen German students and 28 Chinese students were visiting EHS and living with EHS host families as part of a German student exchange program being coordinated by EHS Teacher Levi Antrim and a Chinese student exchange program being coordinated by EHS Teacher Kevin Paur.

Antrim explained that he had just started a new German student exchange program through the German American Partnership Program (GAPP) in which he chose to partner with a school in Calw, Germany.

The 15 German students arrived in Edwardsville with their two teacher chaperones on Feb. 1 and began attending classes with their host EHS students the following day.  The German students followed the class schedule of their host EHS student for a few days before Antrim arranged for them to observe classes that were more of personal interest to the exchange students.

The exchange students’ days and evenings were filled with numerous opportunities to learn about EHS, the city of Edwardsville, SIUE, the St. Louis area, and the general life of Americans.  They went to Woodland Elementary one day to speak to the elementary students about how different life is in Germany compared to America.  They also toured SIUE and went bowling on campus, toured Busch Stadium and explored City Museum in St. Louis.

Antrim pointed out that he chose the city of Calw, located in southwestern Germany, because the size of the city, the school they’ll be visiting and the school’s classes are similar to Edwardsville.  Location was also important.  “The fact that they are in the middle of the Black Forest makes it so that we can have all kinds of beautiful things to see while we are there.  They are close to a bunch of different places that are interesting to go to,” Antrim said.  “Stuttgart is not too far away.  They are the home city of Hermann Hesse, a German author.”

Minnesota health exchange boasts record 116K signups

Minnesota's health insurance exchange announced Wednesday that it enrolled more than 116,000 residents in private plans this year, a record number that comes amid cuts and uncertainty for health care nationwide.
                                             

Open enrollment ended Sunday, and MNsure's signups in its fifth year narrowly beat its previous high of nearly 115,000. But this year's strong figures came in an enrollment period more than two weeks shorter.

MNsure chief executive Allison O'Toole said its performance showcased the importance of the flexibility that Minnesota and the 11 other states with their own exchanges have. While the federal HealthCare.gov portal slashed budgets for advertising and outreach and ended enrollment in mid-December, Minnesota was able to extend its own signup period and continue its campaigns to encourage residents to shop for insurance.

"We've never faced stronger headwinds than we did this year," O'Toole said. "We're so happy to be serving so many Minnesotans."

It also comes on the heels of signs of concern that the state's individual market — where shoppers who don't get coverage through their employers or public programs buy insurance — was nearing collapse. Every insurer providing coverage nearly left the market in 2016, and premiums jumped by double digits in both 2015 and 2016.

The Legislature stepped in last year with a pair of costly measures meant to help control premiums and stem insurers' heavy losses. O'Toole said their registration numbers were proof that the market was stabilizing.

More than 60 percent of MNsure shoppers qualified for federal tax credits on their plans, and the exchange said the average savings was $7,000 per year.

Wright-Patterson joins health information exchange

The 88th Medical Group at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is the first military medical center in Ohio to participate in a civilian Health Information Exchange program. This program provides real-time patient information and improves communication with civilian providers.
                                       

 
Phasing in of the HIE initiative into the 88 MDG facility began in March 2015 by gradually introducing new capabilities for the clinical staff, providing real-time patient information.

Through collaboration with the Ohio Health Information Partnership, a Health Information Exchange and non-profit organization, patient records are kept current and physicians able to review patient encounters in a real-time environment. This data exchange allows physicians to coordinate patient care with outside civilian hospitals for the 58,000 patients cared for at Wright-Patterson.

Bonita Moy, 88 MDG HIE liaison, said by utilizing the HIE, the 88 MDG eliminates duplication of efforts by improving communication with physicians and care coordination with civilian medical facilities.

The CHR is a web-based record system that provides access to patient health data created in other facilities. The information includes patient’s treatment history, hospital encounters, allergies, medications, laboratory and radiology results.

Access to the CHR system is granted to clinical personnel working at the 88 MDG, including pediatrics, admissions and dispositions, utilization management, case management, in-house supervisors and the referral management center. The CHR can be retrieved through the Joint Legacy Viewer, streamlining access to patient information with a single log-on.

In addition to the benefits of seeing real-time record information, a service called Patient Notify, a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act certified secure messaging system, delivers a notification to the key members of the 88 MDG when a patient is either admitted or discharged from an outside facility or emergency room.

STUDENT SHARES EXCHANGE EXPERIENCE

This is a continuation of an article that was published in Issue 8.

Part II; You know the Delft University of Technology?
                                               

My university, the Delft University of Technology, is the largest and oldest Dutch public technological university. It is commonly seen as one of the top 20 universities worldwide for engineering in general, but also aerospace engineering. We have eight facilities which cover the whole range of engineering topics (including some economics) and about 19,000 students. Currently, most Bachelor degrees are still taught in Dutch, but the university is working on transitioning everything completely to English. The aerospace faculty offer Master’s programs solely in English. This is a great advantage, as it allows students from all over the world to come to Delft to enrich the faculty with their diversity.

In contrast to Embry-Riddle, we do not have any specializations in the Bachelor’s degree. We have courses in aeronautics, astronautics, and propulsion all together; we only specialize in our Master’s programs. There we have very diverse programs in Control & Simulation, Operations, Flight Performance & Propulsion, Spaceflight, Aerospace Structures & Materials, and Aerodynamics & Wind Energy. Delft University also offers further specializations for precisely the field of study you love most.

As for student life, Delft is a nice city: the university is so big, everything is very student friendly, and you can get discounts on restaurants and bars. And with Belgium and Germany as neighboring countries, there is a very good selection of tasty beers available everywhere (18+ only). For parties, you can even go to the big cities of Den Haag or Rotterdam via 10-minute train ride. We have a bar run by our student association-a great place to meet all the other Aerospace students.  Once a year we have a big party, Airbase, where the facility gets transformed into a big club with two dancefloors. It is really fun and is a great break from the usual studying in that building.

Regenstrief study to determine whether health information exchange improves emergency care

Are patients less likely to be hospitalized if emergency departments have access to their complete medical record via health information exchange?
                                             

Regenstrief Institute scientists are conducting the first study of health information exchange use over multiple years to evaluate whether it improves patient outcomes in emergency departments. The innovative work will measure actual use of health information exchange over time, across multiple institutions, to generate high-quality evidence of the value and benefit of health information exchange, or HIE, in the delivery of emergency care. The research is supported by a two-year award from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
"Findings from our new study could serve as a report card on potential benefits of HIE and as a template for HIEs as they mature," said Regenstrief Institute investigator Brian E. Dixon, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Indiana University Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health at IUPUI, the principal investigator of the new study.

While researchers at Regenstrief and elsewhere have previously investigated whether the availability of information from health information exchange reduces costs by decreasing duplicate testing and unneeded imaging studies, there is a dearth of knowledge about whether providers' use of health information exchange in the emergency department leads to actual improvements in patient outcomes. And there is limited existing information on which personnel in an emergency department use health information exchange and why those providers choose to do so.
The Regenstrief investigators will review usage logs from the Indiana Network for Patient Care, one of the largest interorganizational clinical data repositories in the country, to determine how frequently information from the health information exchange was used in the emergency department, for what kinds of patients, by what types of health care providers and under what conditions it was most useful. They will also determine which sections of patient medical records—for example, laboratory results, imaging studies, medication list or medical history—were accessed. In addition, they will review the outcome of the visit to determine whether the patient was admitted to the hospital.

COMPANIES NEED TO LEARN FROM SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT

Hillary Gavan/Beloit Daily News (From left): Joe Stadelman, vice president of Angus Young and Beloit 2020 member; Jason Tyszko, executive director of the Center for Education and Workforce at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation; and Greater Beloit Chamber Executive Director Aimee Thurner chat at the Business Education Connection Event held Wednesday at the Eclipse Center. Businesses and educational institutions came together to learn how to bridge the skills gap.
                                                   

BELOIT - Companies need to take lessons learned from supply chain management to build their talent pipeline.

This year's event was titled "Building the Talent Pipeline." In addition to keynote speaker Tyszko, the event featured breakout sessions on mentoring; site visits and industry knowledge; training resources; internships, externships and youth apprenticeships. Businesses as well as representatives from the Janesville, Beloit, Beloit Turner, Clinton, Milton and Parkview school districts attended the event.

It was hosted by the Greater Beloit Chamber of Commerce, Forward Janesville, Rock County 5.0, the Greater Beloit Economic Development Corporation and the Southwest Wisconsin Workforce Development Board. Sponsors were Blackhawk Technical College, Beloit College and UW-Rock County.

To close the skills gap, Tyszko said businesses need to form successful partnerships with educational institutions and other workforce partners.

He added that educational institutions need to form partnerships with employers and job networks outside their communities to give students more job options.

There also needs to be a common set of performance measures to see if employers' partnerships and strategies are working.

Tyszko shared how the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation's TPM Academy trains companies on how to use the supply chain approach to close the skills gap.

Social Amoeba Calculate To Communicate

Slime mold can ‘calculate’ the fold-change of signaling molecules, an ability that helps it behave like a multicellular organism.
                                           

Rather than relying on the absolute change in the levels of signaling molecules, the soil-dwelling social amoeba Dictyostelium responds to fold-change of cell-to-cell communication molecules. These findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, could be applied to other scenarios where intercellular communication is important, such as infection, immunity and embryonic development. Cell-to-cell signaling plays a pivotal role in cellular and tissue organization. A solid communications medium analogous to phone cables seems ideal for establishing the smooth transmission of information between cells.

In the present study, a research group led by Associate Professor Satoshi Sawai at the University of Tokyo set out to find out how Dictyostelium— an organism known as a social amoeba that shows conditional multicellularity—can communicate with each other even under conditions of varying cell density. Through quantitative live-cell imaging with a fluorescence microscope of single cell-level response to signaling molecules, the research group revealed that the Dictyostelium cells’ response remains identical under various background concentrations of stimulus as long as the fold change is the same. In other words, a change in the stimulation level from one to two produces the same result as that from two to four, both representing a twofold change, although the change difference varies.