Providing a glimpse into the future of medical tech innovation, Minnesota’s Department of Health has launched a new online portal aiming to help flu vaccine-strapped health clinics across the state find the closest available immunizations to restock their shelves, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports.

Although the 2013 flu epidemic has been plateauing in recent weeks, the U.S. still finds itself in the midst of the worst influenza outbreak in years. Minnesota has been hit particularly hard in recent weeks, prompting clinics across the state, as well as the Department of Health, to seek out available shots to meet with growing demand — with the help of a little technology:

The Health Department has worked with health care providers experiencing vaccine shortages before, but the exchange marks the first time it has launched an online tool to direct distribution of supplies. The department doesn’t actually redistribute vaccines, which are privately purchased, but instead allows clinics statewide to coordinate among themselves to meet patient demand.

But the publicly viewable online site allows health care providers to shift vaccine supplies where they’re most needed, whether they happen to be buyers or sellers… The exchange is essentially a Web bulletin board: Representatives of health care providers can log in without an account, post their needs, share their contact information and reply to other topic threads. [...]

“I think it is a great tool, but currently is being underutilized,” said Michelle Hanrahan, a wellness coordinator at Wellness Partners, which had already received a response seeking to purchase its extra vaccine.

Minnesota’s web-based solution to the dearth of vaccinations embodies what health care reform advocates hope that Obamacare will force health care providers across the country to do — make information easily accessible and simple to use in an effort to improve patient care and lower health costs.

Other institutions have begun to take similar tech-based approaches to public health problems. For instance, pharmacy giant Walgreens recently announced that it would try to coordinate more with physician groups and health care providers — largely assisted by electronic databases that make it easier to share medical information — in order to provide Americans with an easily-accessible and up-to-date health center. The National Football Association (NFL) also included improved electronic monitoring and sharing of players’ medical inormation as an integral part of its most recent collective bargaining deal with employees.

The teen pregnancy rate in New York City dropped by 27 percent over the last decade, a statistic that city officials credit to teens’ expanded access to contraception.

The city’s health commissioner, Tom Farley, told the New York Daily News that the data shows two concurrent trends: more adolescents are choosing to use birth control, and more of them are also delaying sexual intercourse. That’s partly because New York is one of the 21 states that allows all minors to have access to contraceptive services — and two years ago, the public school system began a pilot program to provide Plan B to public school students in districts with high rates of unintended pregnancy:

The city has worked to make it easier for kids to get birth control — giving out condoms at schools and making birth control and the morning-after pill available in some school clinics, a sometimes controversial move.

Farley said the numbers show that strategy is working.

“It shows that when you make condoms and contraception available to teens, they don’t increase their likelihood of being sexually active. But they get the message that sex is risky,” he said. [...]

Teen pregnancy in the city is still higher than it is nationwide, but it has fallen at a sharper rate, officials said.

Despite the promising trends, health officials in the city note that there are still significant racial and geographic disparities among the teens who are getting pregnant. The Bronx has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the country, and African-American teens in New York City have a much higher pregnancy rate than their white counterparts — 110.7 births for every 1,000 back girls, compared with 16 births for every 1,000 white girls. That trend is evident on a national level, too. Black and Latina women have the highest rates of unplanned pregnancy and, subsequently, the highest rates of abortion.

But the city’s school system is on the right track, since part of addressing the connection between poverty and teen pregnancy is increasing access to affordable birth control. Removing the cost barriers to contraception encourages low-income women to choose longer-lasting, more effective forms of birth control that lower their risk for unintended pregnancy. And increasing adolescents’ access to Plan B is particularly important since the Department of Health and Human Services requires women under the age of 17 to obtain a prescription for Plan B, an unnecessary extra step that is often a barrier preventing adolescents from accessing the contraception they need in a timely manner.

Despite right-wing fervor over Plan B, it is an extremely safe medication that does not actually induce abortion. The majority of parents whose children are enrolled in New York City’s public schools support the city’s initiative to expand access to this type of contraception.

Obamacare has already begun making big changes to the way that insurers and hospitals do business — and now, it’s changing the very way that medical schools train doctors. As Modern Healthcare reports, medical colleges are expanding programs to teach doctors how to coordinate care with other health care workers, focus on patients’ comprehensive, long-term care, and encouraging more general practitioners and primary care providers in anticipation of a changing medical landscape under Obamacare.

One of the most significant ways that Obamacare hopes to transform the American medical industry is by shifting it from an expensive system of private practices to a coordinated care model in which hospitals, nurses, general practitioners, and physicians work together to provide centralized and patient-focused care — what some in the industry refer to as a “medical home” — to lower costs and improve health outcomes. But this strategy’s success depends entirely on a medical workforce that understands how to coordinate care and work in teams — and medical colleges understand that:

Those trends [towards group practices] are gathering speed under Obamacare as government spurs the creation of new health care models like medical homes and accountable-care organizations, which make doctors responsible for soup-to-nuts care and patients’ health over the long term.

Schools like Weill Cornell are teaching would-be doctors how to work more effectively with other health professionals so that they may lead the changes rather than get swept up in them. They are putting a heavy premium on teamwork among doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, social workers, health aides and physician assistants. Doctors prescribe the medicine, but it may be the nurse, the social worker or the home health aide who makes sure it gets taken. [...]

“If care is to be transformed, that can’t happen unless we transform the process of training physicians,” said Carol Aschenbrener, chief medical education officer of the American Association of Medical Colleges.

Teaching hospitals such as NYU Langone are also expanding programs for alternative degrees in public health and hospital administration in an effort to get ahead of the coordinated care curve. Weill Cornell has programs that offer students financial incentives to go into primary care, as well as classes that train doctors to get used to following patients’ treatment regimens and care over the long-term.

That’s especially good news considering the primary doctor shortage that America is potentially facing, and in light of the fact that wasteful Medicare spending is largely spurred by patients not following their treatment regimens. Coordinated, bundled care that streamlines the fragmented health care system will simplify Americans’ care and help them properly follow their treatments, lead healthier lifestyles, and thereby lower health care spending.

Taken together, recent changes in medical school training curricula are very promising for the future of American health care, and a stark reminder that Obamacare doesn’t just aim to reform private insurance — it also contains bold ideas for reforming the very way that health care is delivered in America.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) announced on Monday that he will expand his state’s Medicaid program to extend health coverage to an estimated 600,000 low-income Ohioans. The governor noted that accepting Obamacare’s optional Medicaid expansion will strengthen Ohio’s safety net for its poorest residents, allow state programs to focus their resources on providing care for the mentally ill, and ultimately save the state $13 million dollars over the next seven years.

Ohio is the fifth GOP-led state to indicate support for expanding the Medicaid program, joining Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and North Dakota. In a press conference to unveil his budget priorities for this legislative session, Kasich explained that although he “is not a supporter of Obamacare,” he recognizes that expanding Medicaid “makes great sense” for the people in his state:

We’re doing this for a variety of reasons. Number one, many of these people who are below the $14,000 in income — some of the poorest Ohioans — they get their primary care in an emergency room. Now that is not the best way to get people primary care. Not only is it not good for them, because it doesn’t allow them to get healthy, but secondly, it drives up the cost of everybody’s health care. [...]

If we were to reject extending Medicaid, I believe that we would create financial chaos, particularly across our rural hospitals…because they would no longer be able to get reimbursed for the care that they provide. It would create, in my judgement, a financial mess. In addition to this, many of you know that I have really wanted to work hard to restore the safety net for the mentally ill and the addicted. The fact is, extending Medicaid is going to significantly allow our local providers — of both mental health services and addictive services — with some space and some opportunity to begin to rebuild that safety net, so we don’t find as many of our mentally ill in our jails today because they receive no care. [...]

I am not a supporter of Obamacare. I don’t believe in the individual mandate…and I decided to move forward with the federal exchange rather than the state exchange, where I believe we would have lost control. But I believe this makes great sense for the state of Ohio.

Watch it:

Kasich echoed the sentiments of the other GOP governors who have also agreed to expand Medicaid in their states. Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ), another vocal opponent of President Obama’s health care reform law, conceded last month that expanding the eligibility level for Arizona’s Medicaid program will “secure a federal revenue stream to cover the costs of the uninsured who already show up in our doctors’ offices and emergency rooms” and “protect rural and safety-net hospitals from being pushed to the brink.”

Nonetheless, other Republican leaders across the country are still refusing to accept Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, stubbornly resisting health care reform at the expense of their poorest residents. The ten states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion — some of which have the highest rates of uninsurance in the nation — are all led by GOP governors.

Five developing nations with high rates of infectious diseases — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — have announced they will work collaboratively to fight back against drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB), an epidemic that contributes to hundreds of thousands of deaths around the globe each year.

Drug-resistant TB has a fatality rate of about 50 percent. The new international effort to combat it comes on the heels of increasing reports that the epidemic is worsening, including Monday’s news that a highly-anticipated TB vaccine trial — a study of the first new tuberculosis vaccine in 90 years — failed to achieve its desired results. The World Health Organization warns that the rise of TB strains resistant to antibiotic treatment represents a serious global health threat, particularly in developing nations:

Nearly 60% of the estimated 310,000 cases of multidrug-resistant TB in 2011 occurred in China, India, and Russia, according to the WHO, which has said that those countries must intensify their efforts in order for the global epidemic to be overcome. Multidrug-resistant TB is a form of the disease that doesn’t respond to the two most powerful anti-TB medicines.

The communiqué by the five nations comes after a year of dire reports about the worsening of drug-resistant TB globally despite progress in reducing the incidence of regular TB. Early last year, an Indian physician reported seeing patients whose TB had become so resistant that it didn’t respond to virtually any of the 12 top medicines used against the disease. In June, a research team in China reported its first national survey of drug resistance, finding that 10% of TB patients had multidrug-resistant strains.

With their flourishing economies and emerging middle classes, the five countries — often collectively referred to as the BRICS nations — are under growing pressure to use more of their own funds to address their health issues, rather than accept donations from wealthy developed nations such as the U.S. However, treating drug-resistant forms of the disease is much more costly and complicated than treating regular TB. For years, public-health experts feared that treating resistant strains would distract national health programs from fighting regular TB, which is far more prevalent.

And tuberculosis may just be the tip of the iceberg, as medical experts warn that the rapid rise of drug-resistant bacteria will lead to an impending “antibiotic apocalypse.” In addition to TB, the treatments for common diseases like gonorrhea, E. coli, and penicillin are also losing their effectiveness — and new drugs aren’t being developed quickly enough to replace them.

Drug-resistant diseases aren’t just an issue in developing nations, either. Since testing and marketing new drugs isn’t as profitable for the pharmaceutical industry, the development of new types of antibiotics in this country has also lagged behind. The Food and Drug Administration has attempted to relax its authorization process for new antibiotics in order to spur the development of new drugs, but antibiotic development in the U.S. has continued to stall.

Two separate reports by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and Health Affairs builds upon earlier research to conclude that private insurance plans under the Medicare Advantage program drive up Medicare spending. Ultimately, those private plans raise health care costs by encouraging seniors to cherry pick their health plans respective to their health, Kaiser Health News reports.

Private insurance plans under Medicare Advantage are often able to attract healthier Medicare beneficiaries by offering cheap — but bare-bones — health plans. When those healthier seniors encounter a medical problem that’s too extensive for their private coverage, they switch over to the more generous traditional Medicare program in order to take advantage of its more expansive benefits. That in turn, raises spending in the traditional Medicare pool:

A study released Thursday, by Gerald Riley, a researcher at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), adds to those concerns. The study looked at more than 240,000 people who dropped out of Medicare Advantage plans in 2007, and compared them with beneficiaries who remained in traditional Medicare the entire time. In the six months after leaving the private plans, the former Medicare Advantage patients used an average of $1,021 in medical services each month, while the patients in the control group cost Medicare $710 a month, the study found.

Another study in the December issue of the journal Health Affairs found that people “disenrolling were much more likely than other beneficiaries to report health declines.” Those researchers, led by J. Michael McWilliams, a Harvard Medical School professor, surmised that beneficiaries who developed serious ailments might leave the plans to get unfettered access to physicians and treatments through traditional Medicare, but neither that study nor Riley’s determined what motivated the changes. [...]

McWilliams’ study, along with other analyses in the same issue of Health Affairs, found that generally, Medicare has succeeded in reducing cherry-picking by Medicare Advantage plans by changes in how the program worked, including restrictions in the time periods that people could switch from a private plan back to traditional Medicare. In 2006, Medicare tried to crack down on switches by limiting them to once a year rather than monthly.

While the Health Affairs study notes that there have been some protective measures instituted to prevent this cherry-picking, it still occurs in considerable volume. The findings underscore the reality that adverse selection remains a costly problem in private insurance markets.

While some critics might claim that reductions to Medicare Advantage payments under Obamacare could encourage seniors to continue disenrolling from private Medicare Advantage plans, that hasn’t borne out in reality. In fact, since Obamacare’s cuts to overpayments in Medicare Advantage began to be phased in, enrollment in the program is up while premiums are down.

Furthermore, increased enrollment into traditional Medicare might actually be a desirable outcome — the traditional Medicare program costs less per capita than the private Advantage program. And as these recent studies show, Advantage plans tend to fall short — and cost more — once beneficiaries get sick. As Center for Medicare Advocacy executive director Judith Stein put it, “Private Medicare Advantage plans work for people when they are relatively well, but fall short of traditional Medicare when they are sick or disabled.”

The vast majority of part-time workers in the U.S. don’t have employer-based health insurance, according to a new study from the ADP Research Institute — an issue the health care reform law will help address once it is fully in effect.

The majority of Americans access health insurance through their jobs. But the results from ADP’s study highlight the fact that the current employer-based model often leaves low-wage workers, and particularly those who work fewer than 40 hours a week, in a coverage gap. Only a small percentage of part-time employees are offered health insurance through work, and many of them can’t afford to pay into those plans — but they also typically can’t afford to purchase insurance plans on their own, either.

Fortunately, several Obamacare provisions — including extending Medicaid coverage to additional low-income Americans, providing Americans with subsidies to help them purchase health care on state-based insurance markets, and requiring employers with more than 50 workers to provide health insurance — will start to eliminate some of those coverage gaps and help part-time workers better afford health coverage:

The ADP Research Institute analyzed data from about 300 large employers covering 2 million workers and dependents. Among the employers studied, 23 percent of their workers are part-time but only 8 percent get company-sponsored health benefits. Just 15 percent of part-time workers are even offered health insurance.

Cost is the main reason part-time workers don’t enroll in company health plans when they’re available, especially among those who earn less than $30,000 a year, said Tim Clifford, the president of ADP Benefit Services. That group is due to receive the largest financial assistance under health care reform.

“Part-time coverage has always been pretty low,” Clifford said. “There’s no question that the law will extend coverage to millions of Americans,” he said. But it also will create some disruption within the realm of employer-sponsored health benefits as companies decide whether to open their insurance plans to more workers or devise strategies to avoid Obamacare’s new rules and costs, he said.

ADP’s study builds upon previous research that confirms the health care reform law will help low-wage workers afford the health coverage they need. Particularly in recent years, as health care costs have been skyrocketing while workers’ wages are stagnating, increasing numbers of Americans worry about being able to access and afford insurance coverage.

But as Clifford noted, that hasn’t stopped several extremely profitable companies from trying to get around Obamacare and continue denying their workers basic health benefits. The restaurant industry, which often employs low-wage and part-time workers, has been particularly resistant to Obamacare’s regulation that requires businesses to ensure their employees will be able to afford health care.