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To make health care more accessible and higher quality, insurers and providers are experimenting with a number of new approaches — from storing patient information in the cloud to opening clinics inside of grocery stores. Close cousins to many of these tactics, however, were implemented even earlier in the homeless health care system. Homeless patients’ unique characteristics — they frequently have multiple chronic conditions, they move around often — overlap with some of the pressures driving medicine’s evolving care model today. And the cost and time constraints of the homeless revealed the weakness of the health care system before others saw it. (Seervai, 8/5)

In particular, [ Jennifer Johnston and Andrew Joy] looked at a 2015 study that examined 57 billion tweets, of which 72 million used the word “shooting” and 2 million the words “mass murder” or “school shooting."...If, after a school shooting, at least 10 out of every million tweets mentions the incident, the likelihood that there will be another school shooting increases to 50 percent within eight days after the initial violence and to 100 percent within 35 days afterward, according to the paper. (Mohney and Feely, 8/5)

For decades, Alzheimer’s has been silently ravaging brains, stealing memories and shortening the lives of millions of Americans. Now, researchers say they may be on the brink of tantalizing treatment breakthroughs that could for the first time at least slow the disease’s deadly progression. ... Amyloid, the sticky protein that attaches to brain cells and causes Alzheimer’s, is at the forefront of new therapies. (Buck, 8/7)

Asthma sufferers who live near wells in which hydraulic fracturing is used to extract natural gas are up to four times more likely to have an asthma attack than those who live farther away, according to new research from the Johns Hopkins University.The findings are the latest in a string of studies that have linked health problems to proximity to such wells, and come as Maryland prepares to lift a moratorium next year and issue permits for the controversial method of extraction known as "fracking." (Cohn, 8/5)

All of you who wait until the day before your dental appointment to floss your teeth – which is most of you – a report this week might ease your fleeting guilt: Little clinical research exists that the practice delivers the promised benefits. But dental professionals in Greater Cincinnati say mounds of anecdotal evidence collected by dentists over decades shows daily flossing is better than not flossing to ward off gum disease, which can lead to chronic infection that affects the whole body. Plus, said Dr. Rachel Gold, a Cold Spring general dentist and president of the Northern Kentucky Dental Society, pulling off a rigorous controlled study of daily flossing would be virtually impossible. (Saker, 8/5)