Health law could overwhelm addiction services
Only 1 cent of every health care dollar in the United States goes toward addiction, and few alcoholics and drug addicts receive treatment. One huge barrier, according to many experts, has been a lack of health insurance. But that barrier crumbles in …
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Human service center loses substance abuse treatment license
Human service center loses substance abuse treatment license. JAMESTOWN – South Central Human Service Center's license to provide substance abuse treatment will be suspended starting Monday, leaving some people unsure how to continue treatment.
Read more on Dickinson Press

Funding cuts to drug treatment centers mean addicts get turned away
But there isn't enough subsidized care for the uninsured who need to be admitted on a longer-term basis, said Amy Blount, the program supervisor for a methadone clinic in Greenville, part of a chain of private mental health and addiction treatment …
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Politics of health care reform, cuts impact mental health, substance abuse …
Wendy Stilson, program director at St. Marys Center for Recovery, walks through a bedroom at the center in Salt Lake City on Friday, Sept. 20, 2013. There are six empty beds that cannot be filled due to lack of funding. St. Marys Center for Recovery is …
Read more on Deseret News

Intensive Substance–Abuse Treatment Fails to Deliver Better Results: Study
TUESDAY, Sept. 17 (HealthDay News) — Treating drug and alcohol addiction with a concentrated approach called chronic care management may be no more effective than a single medical appointment and addiction referral, according to a new study.
Read more on U.S. News & World Report

Food addiction: How processed food makes you eat more
More research is needed to examine the relevance of the idea of food addiction and the treatment of eating disorders and obesity. But the fact that a food property may affect addiction centres in the brain, independent of calories or pleasure, provides …
Read more on Medical Xpress

New health law could overwhelm addiction services
CHICAGO (AP) — It has been six decades since doctors concluded that addiction was a disease that could be treated, but today the condition still dwells on the fringes of the medical community. Only 1 cent of every health care dollar in the United …
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Millions more to get coverage for addiction, alcoholism treatment, but can the …
In a major break with the past, 4 million people with drug and alcohol problems — from homeless drug addicts to working moms who drink too much — suddenly will become eligible for insurance coverage under the new health care overhaul. A riot …
Read more on Washington Post

Bangor conference sheds light on drug, alcohol addiction treatment differences …
BANGOR, Maine — When it comes to drug and alcohol addiction, there are differences between men and women, and that means treatment programs need to be different, local substance abuse providers learned Friday at a conference about addiction and …
Read more on Bangor Daily News

Social Innovation Fellows Class of 2012

Image by ChimpLearnGood
FELLOWS

Jamila Abass – MFarm
As CEO of MFarm, Jamila Abass uses mobile technology to help farmers increase their incomes. MFarm provides farmers in Kenya with real-time market price information and a group selling platform where they can connect with other farmers to jointly market their crops in greater volumes. By giving rural farmers more direct and powerful access to buyers, MFarm is positioned to improve hundreds of thousands – and potentially millions – of lives.
www.mfarm.co.ke/

Lukas Biewald – CrowdFlower
Lukas Biewald is CEO and founder of CrowdFlower, a crowdsourcing internet company that breaks large digital projects into small microtasks and distributes them to workers around the world. CrowdFlower engages a workforce of nearly 3.5 million people to complete more than 2 million tasks every day. In a key example, Biewald helped PopTech Science Fellow Sarah Fortune find new ways to study the bacteria that cause tuberculosis. By sharing the workload, making it fun and insisting on quality results, CrowdFlower provides incomes while speeding the path toward more accurate and scalable results.
crowdflower.com/

Rachel Brown – Sisi ni Amani – Kenya
Rachel Brown founded Sisi ni Amani – Kenya ("We are Peace – Kenya" in Swahili) to pioneer the use of mobile technology to get the right communication capacity into the hands of local peacebuilders, enabling communities to participate in democratic processes and prevent violence. Through civic education, engagement and dialogue, SNA-K leverages SMS text messaging to support the peace efforts of community leaders. As a key partner in the collaborative PeaceTXT project, SNA-K is working to make locally effective tools that can be replicated globally in stopping violence and building peace.
sisiniamani.org/

Bryan Doerries – Outside the Wire
Bryan Doerries is the founder of Theater of War, a project that presents readings of ancient Greek plays to service members, veterans, caregivers and families to help them start talking about the challenges faced by military communities today. He is also the co-founder of Outside the Wire, LLC, a social impact company that uses theater and a variety of other media to address pressing public health issues, such as combat-related psychological injury, end of life care, prison reform, political violence and torture, and the de-stigmatization of the treatment of substance abuse and addiction. A self-described evangelist for classical literature and its relevance to our lives today, Doerries uses age-old approaches to help heal very modern wounds.
www.outsidethewirellc.com/

Toure McCluskey – OkCopay
Toure McCluskey is the founder of OkCopay, a unique search engine for medical procedures that helps Americans with inadequate insurance find affordable local health care. At OkCopay, people can quickly search for the procedure they need, compare local providers, and view actual provider prices and details on the appropriate health clinic. By bringing transparency to healthcare costs, OkCopay is ensuring that those most in need can find effective and reasonable health services.
www.okcopay.com/

Nicholas Merrill – Calyx Institute
Nicholas Merrill created the Calyx Institute to help launch a telecommunications and Internet service provider focused on the right to privacy and freedom of expression. Merrill has personally fought intrusive government demands for private customer information, and he aims to develop, document and publicly release technology to enable private communications that even the service provider cannot decode or eavesdrop upon. Merrill’s goal is to inhibit mass surveillance and to protect the privacy and security of users everywhere.
www.facebook.com/calyxinstitute

Jacobo Quintanilla – Internews
Jacobo Quintanilla joined Internews to bring news and information resources to people in humanitarian crises. As Director of Humanitarian Information Projects, Quintanilla has helped create a two-way dialogue between aid workers and affected communities in countries such as Haiti, Central African Republic and Kenya. Building on Internews’ core mission, Quintanilla’s projects empower local media in crisis situations to give people the news and information they need, the ability to connect, and the means to make their voices heard.
internews.org/

Andreas Raptopoulos – Matternet
Andreas Raptopoulos is the founder and CEO of Matternet, building a network of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to transport medicine and goods in places with poor road infrastructure. Matternet’s "drones for good" use small, electric UAVs to transport packages weighing up to 2 kilos and containing items like vaccines, medicines or blood samples, over distances of 10 kilometers at a time. By creating a new paradigm for transportation that leapfrogs roads, Matternet is helping to revolutionize transportation in the developing world.
matternet.us/

Aishwarya Lakshmi Ratan – Global Financial Inclusion Initiative
As director of the Global Financial Inclusion Initiative at Yale University and Innovations for Poverty Action, Aishwarya Ratan focuses on the design and delivery of effective financial services for the poor. GFII seeks to test, evaluate and replicate interventions to improve products, delivery channels and tools ranging from savings products to mobile money and financial literacy programs. The initiative’s rigorous approach to testing and measuring the impact of such innovations aims to ensure that the financial services available to the poor to manage and grow their money are affordable, efficient, secure and welfare-enhancing.
www.poverty-action.org/financialinclusion

Eric Stowe – A Child’s Right / Splash
Eric Stowe believes that every child has a right to clean water—and he has built an innovative, scalable approach to act on that belief. Since founding A Child’s Right (soon to be Splash) in 2006, Stowe has developed a highly effective model to ensure safe water for urban children living at the intersection of these two streets: “greatest degrees of poverty” and “worst water quality conditions.” Leveraging world-class water purification technology, sustainable monitoring and maintenance, excellent people, and a rigorous commitment to transparency, A Child’s Right will soon announce that every orphanage in China has safe drinking water. Stowe’s team will then demonstrate how they are customizing their approach for 15 more countries in Asia and East Africa, using their "Proving It" platform to share both successes and failures at all of their project sites.
achildsright.org/

Eric Woods – Switchboard
Eric Woods is the CEO and founder of Switchboard, which uses mobile phones to create nationwide networks of health workers in developing countries. Switchboard partners with mobile operators to provide health workers with free nationwide calling, a nationwide registry and access to information via bulk text messaging. Having already linked all doctors in both Ghana and Liberia, Switchboard will next connect health workers at all levels throughout Tanzania, working toward the vision of a collaborative network of health advice, referrals and improved care in places where access is most challenging.
www.switchboard.org/

Daniel Zoughbie – Microclinic International
Daniel Zoughbie created Microclinic International to help leverage the power of social network relationships to spread healthy behaviors throughout under-resourced communities. Working in Jordan, India, Kenya, the West Bank and the United States, Microclinic International has begun to show that working through existing social groups of friends and family can significantly help people improve their outcomes in the fight against such diseases as diabetes and HIV/AIDS. The effectiveness of their approach is attracting attention from governments and other large-scale health providers, opening the door to large-scale replication and the broader use of this "contagious health" approach.
microclinics.org/

Sentence for North Pond Hermit to Include Treatment for Substance Abuse
http://wabi.s3.amazonaws.com/news/1379116538-091313news5-6hermit-mp4.mp4. Yes. TV5 Forecast Center. radar. Full Weather Forecast >. Sentence for North Pond Hermit to Include Treatment for Substance Abuse. by Terry Stackhouse – September 13th …
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Substance abuse officials to discuss treatment options for offenders
In 2011, state legislators voted to change the way Kentucky deals with non-violent drug offenders when the General Assembly passed House Bill 463. The goal of the bill was to reduce the number of people incarcerated in state prisons — and stop the …
Read more on messenger-inquirer

Millions for Western Cape Substance Abuse Programmes
The new Prevention for and Treatment of Substance Abuse Act 70 of 2008 legislates that skills development and job creation should become part of the treatment process. The Department of Cultural Affairs and Sports has a role to play to contribute to …
Read more on AllAfrica.com

Suspension: SCHSC can't provide substance abuse treatment for 90 days
Suspension: SCHSC can't provide substance abuse treatment for 90 days. South Central Human Service Center's license to provide substance abuse treatment will be suspended starting Monday, leaving some people unsure how to continue treatment.
Read more on Jamestown Sun

@ISSUE: Why are death rates soaring from prescription drug abuse by women?
Health care providers and women can take steps to protect against prescription painkiller overdoses. It is important that health care providers follow guidelines for responsible opioid prescribing (including screening and monitoring for substance abuse …
Read more on Asbury Park Press

North Jersey 'pill mills' cashing in on painkiller addiction
They came by vanloads from downtown Newark. The Medicaid recipients and homeless drug addicts piled into a medical center in a strip mall in Passaic, where they got cursory examinations and bogus diagnoses from a licensed doctor. The patients left with …
Read more on NorthJersey.com