When La Maestra Community Health Services CEO Zara Marselian found out that patients at her clinics were having trouble putting food on the family table, she opened a Food Pantry.   

To say Jason Howe and his team at Awarepoint Corp. have been busy this year would be an understatement.   

Daylight is often linked to sustainability as a key design element that provides many benefits. Exposure to daylight in the health care environment has long been linked with patient wellness and staff satisfaction, and new research suggests that lighting can improve sleep patterns of elderly patients, and even reduce the need for pain medication. Here in California and in many other states, code requirements and mandates for LEED and other sustainable design measures require attention and detail to how daylighting can be positively deployed. The results are better facilities, improved financial performance, happier employees and healthier patients.   

Fad diets come and go, but the tried and true way to fitness is a change in lifestyle. The same principle stands for health care design and construction. Implementing lean principles is not a quick-fix solution, but requires first a shift in mentality and a mindset that accepts growth and change. Just like with a fitness plan, the key is tailoring the right lean plan for a project. The key lies in figuring out where to start, how to keep it going, and what "lean" really means in each setting. You do not have to be an expert to begin integrating lean into your processes.   

The financial markets are not only taking their toll on workers and those who might have to let them go; health care providers are getting slammed as well.   

Abbott Laboratories (NYSE: ABT) fired 200 sales representatives preparing to market a new abuse-resistant pain pill after the company stopped plans to introduce the drug this year, people familiar with the matter said.   

Shares of WellPoint Inc. (NYSE: WLP) climbed Wednesday after it became the latest insurer to report a steep profit drop but dumped no fresh bad news on investors wary of the sector.   

Jeff Kindler took over as chief executive of drugmaker Pfizer Inc. (NSYE: PFE) in August 2006, just in time to sign off on his predecessor's $16.6 billion deal to sell off all its iconic consumer health brands, from Listerine to Sudafed -- to become a pure pharmaceutical company.   

Serving as construction manager at risk, Gilbane Building Co. has completed construction on the new 315,000-square-foot, 334-bed health care facility at Sharp Memorial Hospital, officially named the Stephen Birch Healthcare Center. Gilbane's Southern California office, based in San Diego, managed the preconstruction and construction efforts.   

Waste Management is building a special services division to help health care operations manage their consumed materials. Waste Management has taken the first step toward this goal in the San Diego market with the purchase of Spectrum Services in San Diego.   

While spinal cord injuries may not be on the front of many people's minds, these types of injuries happen around each of us on a daily basis. According to the University of Alabama National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center, there are 11,000 new spinal cord injuries every year, with an American sustaining a spinal cord injury every 49 minutes. According to the university, the average cost for first year paraplegics is $209,074 and $470,833 for quadriplegics.   

Advances in wireless technology have made it possible to transmit data from remote locations, free consumers who were tethered to old-fashioned communication devices and open up a whole new field -- wireless technology for health care.   

The fundamental tension between the Hippocratic Oath and the realities of economics are at the center of nearly every significant issue in health care today. I joke with my physician, when we are alone in the exam room, that there are two unseen presences tugging her in opposite directions: Hippocrates, who laid down the fundamental principles of healing over two millennia ago, and Adam Smith, the Scottish preacher who articulated the basics of economics about two centuries ago. Every physician today, whether a solo practitioner in Alpine or one of more than 500 Kaiser Permanente physicians, has to deal with the tension between healing and economics. More importantly, every patient in San Diego County is affected, whether they know it or not.   

The collapse of primary care medicine has been in the news for several years, and the problem is getting worse. Recently, only 2 percent of today's medical students indicated they wanted to go into primary care. Training programs in primary care are closing. Two hospitals in Phoenix in the past month have indicated they would no longer train family physicians. Most residency positions in general internal medicine and family medicine are filled with doctors educated in other countries.   

Jan. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Small-cap health-care stocks are trading at the cheapest valuations on record, even though their profits grow twice as fast as at Pfizer Inc. and Johnson & Johnson, the industryís biggest companies.