How one Ontario hospital persuades loved ones of nearly all suitable deceased donors to donate patients' organs

More than five million Americans have Alzheimer’s or similar illnesses, and that number is growing as the population ages - without any immediate prospect of a cure, advocacy groups have begun promoting ways to offer people with dementia a comfortable decline instead of imposing on them a medical model of care, which seeks to defer death through escalating interventions. An Arizona nursing home offers new ways to care for people with dementia.

Thousands of clinics in America have no doctors. The primary care providers are nurse-practitioners – and their results are as good or better than that of the doctors.

In the past, people in poor countries who became blind due to cataracts often had no hope of improvement because of the high costs of treatment. Nepalese ophthalmologist, Sanduk Ruit, perfected a cheap and effective cataract removal technique which allows his patients to see again.

If you've got a life-threatening medical condition, your first call might not be to an economist. But Alvin Roth used a theory about matching markets to help connect kidney patients and donors.

Organ donation waiting lists can often hold wait times of months or even years. Thousands of lives could be saved with better ways to reach to the millions of Americans willing to donate an organ.

The typical surgery for hydrocephalus, a brain swelling disease, often leads to infection. Medical constraints in Uganda inspired a neurosurgeon to create a safer and more effective surgery which is now used in Uganda and the U.S.

An estimated 6,000 "never events" — egregious errors like operations on the wrong limb or instruments left inside a surgical wound — occur every month among Medicare patients alone. Hospitals across the country are revamping their care programs to stop preventable injuries and deaths.

In Zambia, the need for surgery is just as common as in the United States - doctors, however, are rare. So Zambia is training clinical officers – with no medical degrees – to do C-sections and hernia repairs.

An Oklahoma surgery center made news by posting its prices online – a revolutionary idea in an industry where consumers normally are buying blind. This is a big reason health care costs so much, but recent months have seen great advances in transparency.

Hepatitis C is a deadly disease that has yet to be eradicated in the United States (and worldwide). Organizations in El Paso and across the country are working to get people tested and treated for the virus.