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The United States has room for improvement in maternal and child health. Compared to other members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the U.S. has high rates of infant mortality (7 per 1000 live births) and ranks second to last in overall child well-being.

The addiction epidemic is a largely neglected public health crisis in the United States. A study conducted by The National Center for Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University found that 40 million Americans over the age of 12 suffer from addiction to alcohol, nicotine, and illicit substances.

Dr. Ralph Snyderman presents his thoughts on personalized medicine and its progress in the last 15 years in his guest blog post “Personalized Medicine: Then, Now and Coming Soon” on the Personalized Medicine Coalition’s blog, Education & Advocacy.

More than two million Americans have served in the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan since October, 2001, the month after 9/11. The government has the duty to take care of its heroes once they return home, thus the Department of Veteran Affairs, or the VA, was born.

On October 14th 2015, The PMC Biosolutions Summit brought together government representatives, pharmaceutical representatives, researchers, patients, providers and payers to discuss the adoption of personalized medicine within health care systems.

The Affordable Care Act incentivizes prevention, which is the process of identifying and remedying a disease before it occurs. With well-known diseases such as coronary artery disease, which costs the United States about $43 billion per year, there are well-established personalized, predictive, and preventive plans of action. We can identify risk factors for such diseases and have validated plans of action to prevent or slow disease onset.

Drug spending in the United States is astronomical, and Americans are noticing. According to a Kaiser Health Tracking Poll for August of 2015, while 62% of Americans concede that prescription drugs developed in the past 20 years have improved peoples’ lives, 72% of Americans feel that drug costs are unreasonable.

Overcrowding is a problem that EDs have been struggling with for quite some time and it is also the reason why the ambulance buzzing by you on the highway may not arrive where it was originally intended.

Shared decision making is a popular concept in the world of patient engagement and personalized health care. It involves a collaborative conversation between patient and provider which allows the patient to make informed treatment decisions based on their needs, desires, and options for care given to them by their provider.

From employer-sponsored mindfulness exercises to applications on mobile phones, the practice of mindfulness has been popularized as a method for reducing stress and focusing the mind in everyday life.