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Shriners Hospitals for Children, which provide health care to more than 123,000 children annually, without financial obligation to patients or their families, is implementing a fundamental policy change intended to solidify the hospital system’s financial standing.

Those who suffer from mental illness will be well-served by the new health care reforms, according to Angela Kimball, director of state policy for the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

For the melanoma patients who signed on to try a drug known as PLX4032, the clinical trial was a last resort. Their bodies were riddled with tumors, leaving them almost certainly just months to live.

But a few weeks after taking their first dose, nearly all of them began to recover.

The first sign may be that your bright child is having trouble reading, or organizing school assignments, or concentrating on homework. Your child may be frustrated with school, and you may find yourself frustrated with what looks like a lack of effort. And a teacher may also notice that something is amiss.

A computer glitch in the state’s expanded children’s health-insurance plan that has randomly booted families out of the program is causing some patients to forego refilling critical prescriptions, according to several Bozeman doctors.

Today, we are opening up auto-captions to all YouTube users. There will even be a "request processing" button for un-captioned videos that any video owner can click on if they want to speed up the availability of auto-captions. It will take some time to process all the available video, so here are some things to keep in mind: While we plan to broaden the feature to include more languages in the months to come, currently, auto-captioning is only for videos where English is spoken. Just like any speech recognition application, auto-captions require a clearly spoken audio track. Videos with background noise or a muffled voice can't be auto-captioned. President Obama's speech on the recent Chilean Earthquake is a good example of the kind of audio that works for auto-captions. Auto-captions aren't perfect and just like any other transcription, the owner of the video needs to check to make sure they're accurate. In other cases, the audio file may not be good enough to generate auto-captions. But please be patient -- our speech recognition technology gets better every day. Auto-captions should be available to everyone who's interested in using them. We're also working to provide auto-captions for all past user uploads that fit the above mentioned requirements. If you're having trouble enabling them for your video, please visit our Help Center: this article is for uploaders and this article is for viewers.

As of Jan. 1, because of cutbacks at the state Department of Public Health and Human Services, case management for 550 people in 11 counties served by the Mental Health Center in Billings has been drastically reduced. Case managers who used to spend eight hours a month with each client can now spend only 1½ hours a month.

Autism trends, treatments and therapies routinely make headlines. Often overlooked, though, is the financial burden for many families with autistic children. Treatment is extremely expensive. Direct medical and nonmedical costs can add up to as much as $72,000 a year for someone with an extreme case of the disorder, and even $67,000 a year for those on the lower end of the spectrum, according to a study from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Many pediatricians score high on screening their patients for developmental delays, but barely make a passing grade in referring children with suspected delays for further testing or treatment, according to a study from Johns Hopkins Children's Center and other institutions to appear in the February issue of Pediatrics. Because screening is only effective if followed by referral and treatment, pediatricians need two separate formalized systems in their practices — one for screening and one for referral — the investigators write in their report available online Jan. 25.

For parents of children with multiple medical problems, keeping up with countless doctor's appointments, ongoing tests and a variety of medications can be overwhelming, especially for those in challenging socioeconomic situations. 

As a result, families often wind up using the emergency room, the country's most expensive form of care delivery, to get help for their kids.

But a growing concept in health care reform called the "medical home" offers parents a way to simplify, organize and coordinate the complexities of their medically fragile child's health care needs. The medical home is not a location but an approach to care coordination designed to provide a constant trusted source of care, typically by a general pediatrician.

Despite a growing interest in comparative effectiveness research, little medical study is being done to improve this aspect of patient care

The Indian Health Care Improvement Act (IHCIA), the cornerstone legal authority for the provision of health care to American Indians and Alaska Natives, was made permanent when President Obama signed the bill on March 23, as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The authorization of appropriations for the IHCIA had expired in 2000, and while various versions of the bill were considered by Congress since then, the act now has no expiration date.

Life after a spinal cord injury is filled with the challenge of accepting your injury, coping with your limitations and adjusting to an entirely new way of seeing the world. Here, six men and women talk about their lives after a spinal cord injury.

Nagging doubts, compulsions, concerns of contamination, obsessive hoarding: the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder are numerous and varied. What is it like to live this way? How does one maintain a normal life? Six men and women speak about their battles with this disorder.

Multiple sclerosis can be an insidious disease, affecting many parts of the body and gradually causing serious disability. What is it like to live with MS? Eight men and women speak about their experiences.

More than 3 million people in the U.S. have some form of epilepsy. While seizures come in various forms, those with epilepsy cope with similar issues: social stigma, complex treatment options and a feeling of powerlessness. Eight men, women and children discuss what it's like to live with epilepsy.

Less than 20 years ago the median life span for people with cystic fibrosis was 29. Today, with new treatments and earlier diagnosis, those with the inherited disorder are living longer, more fulfilling lives. But with complicated, time-consuming treatments and frequent lung infections, life with cystic fibrosis can be difficult. Six men and women speak about their experiences.

What is it like to have bipolar disorder? To be labeled "crazy"? How do you balance the ups and downs? Here, in their own words, are the stories of nine men and women living with bipolar disorder.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, affects parts of the nervous system that control voluntary muscle movement. The average life span of someone with A.L.S. is five years after diagnosis. Here, six men and women speak about how their lives have changed as a result of this devastating illness.