CDC Introduces New Website to Help Employers Combat Obesity and Reduce Health-Related Costs

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today unveiled LEANWorks!, a Website designed to help businesses address obesity. LEAN stands for Leading Employees to Activity and Nutrition. The new Website was announced at a National Business Group on Health meeting in Washington, D.C.

“CDC LEANWorks! was developed in direct response to organizations asking CDC for help in addressing the obesity epidemic. Specifically they wanted to know what interventions were effective in helping employees maintain a healthy weight,” said William Dietz, M.D., Ph.D., director of CDC’s Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity. “CDC has identified science-based interventions that work to prevent and control obesity. CDC LEANWorks! provides the tools that employers need to take action.”

The free Website was developed particularly for small and mid-size companies, which typically have more limited resources to devote to obesity prevention efforts. However, the tools and resources available on CDC LEANWorks! can benefit companies of any size. CDC LEANWorks! can help employers calculate the cost of obesity for their organizations and develop tailored approaches to help control these costs through interventions such as fitness classes, lunchtime health education sessions, weight management programs, and more.

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

A impressive free resource for health info the UK.

From an E-Mail Note:

The Health Management Specialist Collection is a free, web-based library of high quality information resources. It is aimed at all healthcare professionals with a management role or interest. The site has a growing number of subject-based RSS feeds and regularly updated information on hot topics such as commissioning, patient safety and service provision. A free, twice-weekly alert service comprising of links and short summaries of the key documents published that week from national healthcare organisations is also produced. If you wish to sign up for the news alert, please e-mail hmsc@kingsfund.org.uk. The resource does not require any registration and is managed by a dedicated information specialist.

Source: NHS Evidence Health Information Resources website (formerly the National Library for Health)

10 lists along with background articles and methodology.

1] Marketer Trees 2009

Featuring U.S. ad spending, division sales, personnel, brands and agencies.

2] Rankings, Analysis, Charts And More

3] U.S. Ad Spend Trends: 2008 (PDF)

4] Top 200 Megabrands

By U.S. measured media spending in 2008

5] Total U.S. Advertising Spending by Medium

6] Total U.S. Measured Advertising Spending by Category

7] Top 10 Advertisers in 10 Media

Top spenders in magazine, newspaper, outdoor, radio, broadcast TV, cable and internet based in measured media

8] U.S. Advertising as Percent of Sales

9] U.S. Market Share Leaders

Marketers in key ad categories for 2008: Automotive, retail, restaurants, wireless, beverages, beer, prescription drugs, personal care and credit cards.

10] Methodology and Background Articles

Methodology is found near the bottom of the page.

Source: AdAge

From an Introductory Article:

Dartmouth’s atlas of health care costs demonstrates a vexing issue facing policymakers: Medicare spends vastly different amounts to care for its enrollees depending on where they live.

Direct to Interactive Map

Source: MSNBC, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Dartmouth Atlas Project

What’s Your Household’s Cap-and-Trade Tax Burden?

Americans can now estimate how much a U.S. cap-and-trade system would cost their individual households annually with the Tax Foundation’s new Household Cap-and-Trade Burden Calculator. The calculator can be found at http://www.taxfoundation.org/capandtrade.

The calculator is based upon a study released in March, Tax Foundation Working Paper No. 6, “Who Pays for Climate Policy? New Estimates of the Household Burden and Economic Impact of a U.S. Cap-and-Trade System.” The study shows that a cap-and-trade system designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 15 percent would place an annual burden of $144.8 billion on American households. The average annual household burden would be $1,218, which would be approximately 2% of the average household income.

Although carbon emission permits under a cap-and-trade system would be purchased first by energy companies, the costs are ultimately paid by American consumers. The calculator asks how much a household’s combined monthly income is (pre-tax) and how much a household spends monthly on various items like electricity, natural gas, food, clothing and transportation. It then calculates the total annual additional cost that cap-and-trade would impose on that household as well as the cap-and-trade burden as a percentage of income.

Source: Tax Foundation

How to Research and Buy a Franchise

What is a franchise opportunity and how do you investigate the myriad choices available? And once you choose the one you want, where do find the money to pay for it? Our easy-to-follow guide offers all the information you need to find and buy a franchise.

Source: Entreprenuer

Hat tip: PW

From the News Release:

CrocTail provides an interface for browsing information about several hundred thousand U.S. publicly traded corporations and their many foreign and domestic subsidiaries. Information from company Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings has been parsed and annotated by CorpWatch to highlight specific corporate accountability issues.

[Snip]

Although the SEC provides a search interface for locating company filings (EDGAR / IDEA), the subsidiary information is not standardized. The CorpWatch developers wrote parsers to “scrape” the subsidiary relationship information from Exhibit 21 of the 10-K filings, and then built an “API” (Application Programming Interface) to provide a well-structured interface for web programs to query and process the subsidiary data.

Direct to CrocTail

Source: CorpWatch (Sunlight Foundation Blog)

This audio only podcast discusses finding business records in the National Archives. This presentation is part of the National Archives podcast series.

Direct to Podcast (MP3 File)

Source: National Archives (UK)

From a Global Legal Monitor Post:

The World Trade Organization has recently posted on its website an interactive map that depicts disputes between its member states. The top of the webpage shows a list of highlight-able choices among types of member-state involvement in disputes: as complainant, respondent, or either. The accompanying map shows member-state areas of the world in a color range of whitish pink to red, to indicate the range in the number of disputes (0-100), and non-member-state areas in gray; the United States is bright red.

The user can click on a region of the world to highlight a given member state, to see the WTO disputes in which it is involved; alternatively, there is a drop-down box from which a country selection can be made. For example, clicking on the China area of the map, with the choice of “either,” causes lines in red (complainant) and blue (respondent) linking it to the other member state to pop up. A boxed number where the respective state is located shows that China is a complainant in four cases against the United States, and a respondent in seven cases brought by the United States, among cases brought by other member states. Clicking on the box brings up the details of the cases.

Direct to Interactive Maps

Source: World Trade Organization

Over on the VIP LiveWire site, Gary has written an overview article about one of the most useful (it’s also free) international business info sites/portal, named globalEDGE. You can read the complete article here. We hope you find it useful.

Digital Marketing Metrics: Making the Most of What you Measure

The current economy is putting pressure on marketers to be more accountable and better focus their budgets. Due to continued growth in online media and its perceived measurability, more spend is shifting to digital marketing. In fact, more than 70 percent of marketers expect to increase digital marketing spending in 2009 at the expense of more traditional media like print and television. Over a third of these marketers, however, are struggling to quantify the value of online spend. And they recognize that they could be doing a better job of converting site visits into leads or customers.

Many marketers are relying on basic Web traffic metrics such as “page views” and “unique visitors” to measure the success of their online marketing. Unfortunately, such metrics are highly correlated with spend and tend to be self-fulfilling—that is, the more you spend the better the numbers may look. Furthermore, these traffic-oriented metrics leave unanswered the more fundamental questions of the effectiveness and economic value generated through online efforts.

Source: Deloitte LLP

The Best Online Tools for Personal Finance

It’s tougher than ever to plan your finances. But it’s also easier than ever to find help on the cheap.

There are a host of Web sites that help you lay out a budget and track your spending and investments. Some let you set up a plan for a long-term goal, like college or retirement, and others offer advice about where to put your money. And many of these services are free of charge.

To help you wade through all the choices, we scoured the Web to find some of the best online tools and got recommendations from personal-finance pros. Here’s a look at some of the best sites we turned up, in a range of categories.

Source: Wall Street Journal

From the Announcement:

As part of the gateway page, the Foundation unveiled some new resources:

+ An interactive tool for comparing major health care reform proposals, including President Obama’s Principles for Health Reform and congressional proposals from Senator Baucus, the Senate Finance Committee, Senators Wyden and Bennett, and Representatives Conyers, Dingell, and Stark. The side-by-side allows users to choose which proposals and characteristics to compare, including coverage, cost containment and financing. The side-by-side will be regularly updated to reflect changes in the proposals and to incorporate major new proposals.

+ A new, interactive Web-based timeline that chronicles key events and noteworthy activities in health reform from the early 1900s through today.

+ A series of Explaining Health Care Reform Briefs providing an overview of key topics and concepts being discussed in health reform efforts. The initial three Briefs explore “what is health insurance”, “what is an employer pay or play requirement”, and “what are health insurance exchanges”.

+ A glossary providing simple, straightforward definitions of key terms to assist in understanding the concepts included in health reform proposals.

Direct to Website

Source: KFF
Hat Tip: S.B.

From the Post:

Reuters has launched the second of what it describes as a series of sites that will be to provide niche communities easy access to relevant information. This small business site http://digbig.com/4yttf includes breaking news, articles, relevant to small business, a small business blog, and access to the Findlaw small business resource centre covering such items as setting up a business, business planning, licensing etc.

Reuters launched an earlier niche site in April 2009 which covers green business…

+ Direct to Small Business Site

Source: VIP LiveWire

This free service (registration required) allows you to track company news published in the many BizJournal.com newspapers/web sites.

Anytime you see the “w” symbol next to a company name in one of our articles, you can click it and choose to “watch” it.

From the Web Site:

The CompanyWatch email allows you to choose up to 10 companies to “watch.” We send you one email a week with all articles that have to do with your companies of interest, so you won’t miss any of them. You are also free to add or drop companies as you see fit.

Source: BizJournals.com