Edgar T Wilson

A New Jersey law firm pursuing a worker’s compensation case has stumbled onto what might be the ultimate social determinants of health question:
Should work compensate us for negatively affecting our health?
The law firm asserts that employment which causes or exacerbates depression is valid grounds for a worker’s compensation suit. Apparently, this can vary from state to state, as laws regarding mental health and medical care aren’t always in alignment. Depression caused by a physical workpl...

Cause and effect aren’t always clearly and correctly paired in America’s classrooms.
Teachers don’t always have the time, energy, or awareness to properly attribute underperformance.
Is a disengaged student sleeping at his or her desk being lazy or suffering from lack of sleep?
Is disruptive behavior the reflection of student boredom or a cover for not understanding the material?
Is a sudden drop in academic performance really indicative of intelligence or simply a need for reading glasses?
A...

News travels fast; change happens slowly.
That is the trend in healthcare when it comes to novel connected care technology and measurable benefits to patients, providers, or clinics. The tension is strong in part because the internet enables stories to travel so quickly and so widely, but the practical challenges of incorporating anything new into the clinical routine have not been similarly expedited.
It isn’t just the internet worsening the disconnect. The “disrupt everything” mentality mad...

Folks, we need to talk about ZDogg.
For those of you who have no clue what “ZDogg” means (which seems to be a diminishing share of the American healthcare community), there are a few key things to know.
ZDogg is the stage name of Zubin Damania, a doctor — a hospitalist, if you want to play the specialist card (and I know many of you do) — who made the perplexing decision to double-major in molecular biology and music as an undergrad before going on to medical school. The formula for his succe...

Just like households should be putting money into an HR emergency fund with every paycheck, HR has a responsibility to prepare for the unpredictable yet inevitable. Only for HR, the “emergency” in question isn’t a natural disaster, car accident, or other disaster in the “Hollywood blockbuster” sense. HR emergencies are often as simple as turnover of employees in critical positions, the loss of invaluable human capital.

Anticipating Disaster

The business world can be as predictably unpredictab...

Guest post by Edgar Wilson.
Sherlock Holmes famously captured the popular imagination with his uncanny ability to make wild, but accurate, leaps of logic to solve mysteries. By observing Dr. Watson’s suit jacket sleeve, upon their first encounter, he was able to deduce that Watson was in fact a surgeon, in the British Army, and had recently returned from Afghanistan, where he had sustained an injury.
When he slowed down to explain his reasoning, it was easy to follow; what made his deductions...

It is popular to talk about the decline of both American education and the country’s healthcare system as though the failings are intrinsic to the people working in them.
For instance, one common refrain holds that doctors are in the pocket of Big Pharma. Supposedly, they are over-prescribing and driving up costs for their own enrichment. At the same time, they fight quality measures because they would rather be paid for volume than reimbursed for their actual clinical performance.
In a simil...

We love to complain about the ills of our screen-addictions. From ceaseless texting leading to distracted driving, to those viral images (ironically, so popular on social media) of groups of young people meeting up only to stare down at their phones, never speaking, mobile tech is an easy target for griping. But the body of evidence is growing around smart devices–phones, as well as wearables–being the biggest thing in healthcare since hand-washing.
People and Things Have a Healthy Relationsh...

Measuring the progress of any endeavor requires a definition of success....

Hppy | HR & Employee Engagement News and Resources

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