by Andrea Baer, MS, Director of Patient Advocacy and Program Management at Mended Hearts “I have been where you are, I know how you feel” – That’s a powerful statement. The sense of connectiveness and bonding that can happen is soothing, and often a key to successful recovery. Individuals who are going through a medical crisis or learning to change their lifestyle can find success in these connections. When my son was born in 2009 with a congenital heart defect, I was scared, alone and feared our future. I was given lots of medical information from healthcare professionals, but […]
Category: Social Media and Healthcare
State of Healthcare 2017
Health care in America was a constant subject of conversations in public venues and political forums in 2017. There has been confusion about health insurance, failed legislation, Executive Orders reversing Obamacare guidelines, tax plans affecting healthcare costs, and the failure to fund healthcare programs that cover millions of low-income Americans. People in the United States continue to count healthcare costs as a major concern. We at NeedyMeds prefer to remain apolitical, but it is difficult to avoid the partisan nature of the changes in health care in America since the Trump administration’s inauguration last year. Donald Trump ran on the […]
NeedyMeds in 2017
We’re wrapping up 2017 here at NeedyMeds, and it’s been a big year for us. We celebrated twenty years of providing information to those in need and we have kept true to our original mission to provide information on programs that help people who can’t afford medications and healthcare costs. We have helped over 57,000 on our toll-free helpline in 2017, and saved users over $44 million on their prescriptions with the NeedyMeds Drug Discount Card. This year we began a new partnership with Healthcare Storylines to bring you the NeedyMeds Storylines app—a free self-care smartphone app that makes […]
Patient Safety Advocates Oppose Foreign Online Pharmacies
Last summer the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies (ASOP Global) launched a campaign to raise awareness of counterfeit drugs from foreign online pharmacies. This year, they have drafted a letter to the U.S. Congress to encourage them to oppose proposals that allow American consumers to buy Health Canada-approved medication from “legitimate” Canadian online pharmacies. Buying medications from other countries has been an idea proposed to combat the high cost of prescriptions in the United States. Starting in 1999 politicians began filling buses with senior constituents and driving them to Canada, starting with then-Representative Bernie Sanders from Vermont. The seniors would […]
FTC Goes After Crowdfunding Fraud – How HEALfundr is Immune
In previous blog posts, we have detailed a relatively new method for fundraising for medical expenses called crowdfunding along with our own crowdfunding platform, HEALfundr. Recently, there has been some news regarding the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and a crowdfunding project that made us want to touch upon some key differences between HEALfundr and other crowdfunding platforms. This month, the FTC formally charged the creator of a Kickstarter campaign with deception by spending crowd-raised funds on himself and unrelated projects instead of the board game represented in his campaign. Using the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform, intended for creative or entrepreneurial […]