At the recent Planetree Conference, promoting patient-/person-centered care, we heard some of the best “evidence” that Health Nuts Media animation was having a truly wonderful impact upon patients. These patient success stories came from one of the good folks at JFK Medical Center in New Jersey where they are using HNM content via their interactive in-room patient video services system provided by our channel partner, TVR Communications.

Adriana Rizzolo, MSN RN CRNP, spoke about some of her experiences using Health Nuts Media’s patient education content. She is a Pediatric Clinical Nurse Specialist who serves as the clinical leader for Pediatric Nursing within JFK Medical Center. Her skills include clinical expertise in pediatrics, evidence based practice, collaboration, consultation, education, mentoring, and change leadership.

Adrianna’s clinical expertise stems from 6 years experience as a Pediatric Acute Care and Critical Care Nurse at a level one trauma center. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Nursing and her Master’s degree as a Pediatric Nurse Practitioner. She is board certified (more…)

A story on UpstreamDownstream.org entitled Animation Works! really caught my attention today (pretty understandably, considering the work we do here at Health Nuts Media!)

Written by “Qians,” a Masters Candidate in Health Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the short post notes how animation can help “deliver important but abstruse messages” to people with low health literacy. He tells how a wonderful animation, The Story of Cholera, was used by a UNICEF development consultant to help villagers in a cholera-stricken West African community. After watching the video, even though they weren’t able to understand the English narration, the villagers were able to understand the key messages about cholera, sanitation, and what they could do to help stop the spread of this horrible infection.

The video is a masterpiece of healthcare animation! (more…)

Seattle Times reports on advances in technology to help people with asthma

Los Angeles, CA — August 9, 2012: Last week, the Seattle Times ran a great little piece entitled, “New high-tech devices monitor asthma, raise awareness” in which Health Nuts Media and one of our wonderful distribution partners, Learn360 Health were highlighted.

Staff reporter Kibkabe Araya researched how “Technology is helping people with asthma better manage their symptoms, even avoid certain triggers. Companies are unveiling devices that track inhaler usage with GPS, measure wheezing and compile data on smartphone mobile apps.”

According to the article, “‘We discovered over 85 percent of patients can bring their asthma under control,’ (more…)

Here’s a simple question: Why have the worlds of healthcare and “medicine” always avoided making health fun?

Here’s a simple answer: Making health fun just ain’t easy. (Please pardon the “ain’t.”)

Think about it. The worlds of health, healthcare, and medicine have long been owned by the elite. Typically, in years past, it was only the rich or privileged who were able to get medical training. Historically, the elite in their ivory towers of medical knowledge didn’t write down their wisdom for the general public; they wrote “scholarly” papers designed to talk in big terms using big words to “big” people with big vocabularies (and, many times, with big heads.) “It’s complicated, so it must be discussed with big words and in long, dull documents,” they said. And that is where they stopped. And that has become medical tradition.

Well, they were right…sort of. Health and the workings of the human body are pretty darn complex. There’s a whole lotta stuff going on inside of each of us. There’s a lot of “this thing connected to that thing causing the other thing to do some different thing.” We’re pretty amazing creatures full of complicated “machinery.”

But those medical elitists were wrong, too. Complicated or not, every single one of us has “health” (more…)

Throughout the world, telehealth services have shown their merit. The United States, however, has taken a bit longer to embrace it. Fortunately, telehealth, also referred to as telemedicine, is gaining bigger and stronger footholds in the U.S. The legal obstacles are being ironed out and reimbursement for telehealth services is improving.

One of the primary driving forces for this change is the lack of sufficient access to medical specialists for many people, especially those outside of major metropolitan areas. Specialists often have tremendous waiting lists; it can take months to gain an appointment. Plus, people in rural areas often must drive for hours to reach specialty care centers. (more…)