Teen Pregnancy and Births
Teen pregnancies and births continued to be a challenge for us in 2014, but we continued to see encouraging results. Having a baby as a teenager impacts the mom, the dad, the baby and the whole community. Teen parents often don’t finish high school, which in turn, reduces their ability to […]
Childhood Immunizations
Childhood immunizations are widely credited as one of the top ten public health achievements of the 20th century. For the 13 diseases included on the current U.S. childhood immunization schedule, 20 million cases of disease are prevented per year, 42,000 lives are saved, and the healthcare system realizes $13.6 million […]
American Medical Response’s Application Approved
This morning I approved American Medical Response’s (AMR Maricopa) application to operate ambulances in Maricopa County (called a Certificate of Necessity or CON). I approved the Certificate of Necessity after reviewing a host of evidence presented to an Administrative Law […]
Cardiac Arrest Survival
Sudden cardiac arrest continued to be a leading cause of death in Arizona during 2014 (7,600/ year), but we also had some promising results. A few years ago our Bureau of EMS & Trauma System enticed dozens of AZ hospitals to become a Cardiac Receiving Centers. The initiative helps hospitals […]
Obesity & Its Consequences
Research in 2014 found increasing evidence that a person’s nutrition and physical activity in the first 5 years of life has a huge impact on the person’s weight and health status as an adult. One study published in the New […]
The Advent of Big Data
We collect all kinds of surveillance about prevalence of disease, birth, causes of death, reasons for hospital visits, smoking rates and hundreds of other indicators to help us assess health indicators and design interventions to improve outcomes.
For the first time ever in 2014, we developed a tool to explore this data […]
