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Atrius Health, the state’s largest independent doctors group, is pouring $10 million into an “innovation center” that will study ways to shake up how health care is delivered. ... Atrius executives said they must rethink traditional doctor-patient relationships and office visits as the health care industry moves toward payment models that demand greater efficiency and better performance. Atrius’s innovation team will study ways to change care, for example by allowing patients to video chat with doctors and deploying health coaches to help patients manage their diseases. Dr. Karen DaSilva, vice president of innovation at Atrius, said the new team will start by interviewing staff and patients to find areas that need improvement. (McCluskey, 4/27)

Jane Maier was one of a select group of patients invited in early 2012 to help Partners HealthCare, Massachusetts’ largest health system, pick its new electronic health record system – a critical investment of close to $700 million. The system, which is now being phased in, will help coordinate services and reshape how patients and doctors find and read medical information. The fact that Partners sought the perspective of patients highlights how hospitals increasingly care about what their customers think. ... Patient advisory councils, like the one Maier belongs to, often serve as sounding boards for hospital leaders – offering advice on a range of issues. Members are usually patients and relatives who had bad hospital experiences and want to change how things work, or who liked their stay and want to remain involved. (Luthra, 4/27)

For first-year Temple nursing students, a recent classroom session on how to cover rent, child care, food, medicine, and transportation on a bare-bones budget was an academic exercise. In Philadelphia, a staggering 28 percent of residents live in poverty. For many, deprivation also means a life of poor health. Without decent housing, access to medical care, healthful food, and safe exercise outlets - and with the stress that comes with deprivation - the poor face major hurdles to getting and staying well. So nursing programs such as Temple's are spending more time on what academics call the "social determinants of health" to make a real impact on patients' lives and health. (Rush, 4/26)

There are 26 barbers and stylists at The Shop in Hyattsville, Md. Between them, they cut the hair of more than 100 people each day. That’s around 600 people each week, 31,000 heads each year. Over the last two years, 29 of those customers received a colonoscopy as a direct result of conversations they had with their barbers at The Shop. One of those people, says owner Fredie Spry, was already showing symptoms of colon cancer and is now getting treated. Many more of Spry’s African-American clients learned that the cancer is one of the few that are preventable and — given blacks’ higher-than-average risk for the disease — they should consider getting a first colonoscopy at 45. (Stein, 4/24)

When Lauryn Santiago’s grades started to slip two years ago, her mother, Linda Diaz, suspected something was wrong. Diaz called her daughter’s high school and asked the counselor to meet with Lauryn. But the meeting never happened. A month later, Diaz found her 15-year-old daughter hanging from the banister of their home. Lauryn, a freshman at Laurel High School in Prince George’s County, had taken her own life. (Wiggins, 4/26)