NeedyMeds, Social Media and Healthcare
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Giving Tuesday 2014

NeedyMeds is proud to be participating in #GivingTuesday again this year. #GivingTuesday is a first of its kind effort to transform how people participate in the giving season. Similar to how Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday have become synonymous with holiday shopping, #GivingTuesday aims to make the Tuesday after Thanksgiving a National Day of Giving. In 2012 over 2,500 organizations partnered with #GivingTuesday and raised over $10 Million in online donations in a single day, and last year over 10,000 organizations participated raising more than $19 Million.   History of GivingTuesday New York’s 92nd Street Y was […]

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Diabetes, Disease Resources
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Lowering Your Diabetes Costs

Tips from Consumer Reports Best Buy Drugs With approximately 29 million Americans affected by diabetes, or 9.3 percent of the U.S. population, the costs associated with the disease are a growing problem. As of 2012, the total healthcare costs for diagnosed diabetes in the U.S. is roughly $245 billion, an increase of 41 percent since 2007, and according to the American Diabetes Association, a person with diabetes spends on average $13,700 per year on care. National Diabetes Month, held every November, is a time of year to raise awareness about diabetes prevention and treatment, and also to discuss how high […]

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Health
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Americans Still Taking Risks with Needed Medications

Plus: How to lower your drug costs Americans take a lot of medicines – and many resort to risky behaviors to afford them. That’s according to a recent national telephone poll by public-education project Consumer Reports Best Buy Drugs.  Forty-four percent of Americans take an average of 4.5 prescription drugs; 16 percent say they take 7 or more. To afford those medications, more than half (57 percent) of those polled reported taking steps in the last year—some of them potentially dangerous—to curb high drug costs. That included not filling a prescription (17 percent), skipping a scheduled dose (14 percent), and […]

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Medicine Safety
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Medication Safety at Home

We hear in the media of mistakes made in hospitals including errors in administering medication. A new study shows that a child is improperly medicated at home every eight minutes. The study published by the journal Pediatrics is based on data from the National Poison Database System between the years of 2002 and 2012. The statistics don’t reflect the real scope of the problem since not everyone reports an error to poison control or may even be aware they made a mistake. In the 10-year time period, 696,937 children younger than 6 years old experienced out-of-hospital medication errors. The most common […]

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Safety
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How to Safely Dispose of Needles

NeedyMeds is pleased to announce our latest partnership with SafeNeedleDisposal.org! In honor of this new partnership we are spotlighting this week’s blog post on the safe disposal of needles.   Needle disposal is a public health and safety issue that is commonly overlooked. The problem is that there are limited options for safe disposal of needles which leads to dangerous situations for the public – including injury and the spread of infectious disease. Additionally, information about safely disposing of syringes and needles is difficult to come by and often misunderstood. Each year “approximately 9 million syringe users will administer at […]

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About Us

Welcome to the NeedyMeds Voice! We look forward to presenting you with timely, provocative pieces on healthcare reform, patient advocacy, medication and healthcare access, and other health-related news. Our goals are to educate, enlighten, and elucidate; together, we will try to make sense of the myriad and ongoing healthcare-related changes in the U.S. today.