UPMC on Monday said it will partner with Health Catalyst to take on the rising cost of healthcare by commercializing the healthcare system's cost management technology. Neither partner is releasing the financial terms of the deal, but Health Catalyst CEO Dan Burton said it was the company's biggest yet to a new customer. The Salt Lake City-based company's first similar partnership with a healthcare provider was with Minneapolis-based Allina Health. That deal was valued at $100 million. While previous deals were aimed at boosting healthcare quality and outcomes while also reducing cost, but none has been as focused on cost as the UPMC does.
Milford Regional is part of a wave of hospitals nationwide that are implementing volunteer programs with the goal of making sure patients have companionship when they pass away. About one-third of all deaths still occur in hospitals, despite efforts to discourage this. Boston Medical Center, which treats many homeless patients who are estranged from their families, adopted a similar program about two years ago. BMC recruits its own employees for vigils, including the hospital's associate general counsel, an executive assistant, and a manager in information technology. The idea emerged 15 years ago at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Oregon, where Sandra Clarke worked the night shift as a critical care nurse.
A California supercomputer is advising heart specialists in Minneapolis on when they should — and more importantly when they shouldn't — thread instruments inside patients' blood vessels to examine blockages. The so-called HeartFlow system uses images from a patient's CT scan and analyzes them against volumes of data on the human vascular system and the science of fluid dynamics. As a result, it can diagnose patients' needs — and help doctors avert heart attacks and stroke — without the costly and invasive procedure of inserting a catheter. "It should decrease the number of people who end up in the cath lab who don't have lesions that matter," said Dr. John Lesser, who directs cardiovascular imaging at Allina Health's Minneapolis Heart Institute.
Already accustomed to sharing a bone marrow transplant program, Sharp HealthCare and the UC San Diego Health System are broadening their collaboration to include liver transplantation. The two organizations have finalized a deal designed to streamline joint management of highly complex and expensive cases — from the moment symptoms of liver failure emerge to the extensive post-surgical care needed to prevent a recipient's body from rejecting a new liver. Although it has long-standing transplant programs for the heart, kidney and pancreas, Sharp currently does not perform liver transplant surgeries. That will not change under the joint management agreement with the university, which already handles the bulk of Sharp's liver transplant cases.
Although nearly four million people a year sustain concussions, there's still a lot doctors don't know about them, including Dr. Munro Cullum. The neuropsychologist is one of the researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center leading a study of several hundred people to eventually come up with better treatment for concussion. The current main treatment for concussion: "Rest. But we don't know exactly much rest is good and for whom. One individual may recover rather completely within hours, days. A small subset of individuals tend to show a little bit longer recover, and we need to better identify who those people are and what factors in their background might contribute to prolonged recovery. Or maybe even given us some indication as to might respond best to some specific treatment."
In my first year of training as a doctor, I knew something was wrong with me. I had trouble sleeping. I had difficulty feeling joy. I was prone to crying at inopportune times. Even worse, I had trouble connecting with patients. I felt as if I couldn't please anyone, and I felt susceptible to feelings of despair and panic. I'm a physician, and, if I do say so myself, a very well-trained one. Yet it took an "intern support group" and the social worker who ran it, close friends and my fiancée (now my wife) to convince me that I might need help. Even if I couldn't acknowledge it, they could see I was suffering from depression.