Dr. Arthur Jey shepherded a middle-aged female patient, hunched over in pain, from the Sutter General emergency waiting area to a nearby exam room – wrapping an arm around her back as he placed her gently in a chair. He knelt on the hospital floor as he examined her aching abdomen and asked about her health history. In a corner of the room, Veronica Cordero, a medical scribe, clacked at the keyboard on her mobile workstation. With doctors such as Jey burdened by what they say are the growing demands of digital record keeping, Cordero was providing much-needed relief. Medical scribes electronically document patient visits so doctors don't have to, and they're in high demand across the country.
Many patients may be able to shower just two days after their operations without increasing their risk of infections around the incision site, a recent study suggests. Even though showering can lift patients' spirits, potentially speeding recovery, concerns about contamination often prompt doctors to advise against getting wounds wet until stitches are removed, which can take many days, or even weeks. But when researchers randomly permitted some patients with relatively low-risk surgical wounds to shower 48 hours after their operations, the people who got to bathe were happier with their care - and their odds of infection were no different from those of their unwashed peers.
GROW OR DIE. It's the choice facing any business — including the health care business. For Partners HealthCare, growth is now curtailed in Massachusetts — at least when it comes to acquiring hospitals. This once unstoppable network of doctors and hospitals was stopped in its expansionary tracks last January when a judge rejected a plan to allow Partners to acquire three community hospitals. The new state attorney general also threatened an antitrust suit if Partners tried to push ahead anyway. With its bricks-and-mortar growth now on hold in Massachusetts, Partners is readjusting its business model. Maybe it's time to throw it out — and de-partner Partners.
Back in September 2007, I created a new kind of doctor practice. The iPhone had come out three months prior, and Google had enabled you to embed your Google Calendar in a website just the month before. I saw a perfect storm of technology leading to an opportunity to do something unprecedented and become my own boss. As an amateur photographer plugged into the creative community of NYC, I had many friends who were uninsured artists and freelancers who occasionally needed health care. They couldn't afford to go to the emergency room, and there were no urgent-care centers in New York at the time. They needed an accessible, cost-effective doctor.
In February, the National Academy of Medicine published a report attempting to better define the condition known as chronic fatigue syndrome, also called myalgic encephalomyelitis; in September, we reported that advisers to the Department of Health and Human Services recommended increasing funding for research into the condition.The following is a look at what has happened since that story.
Employees of Atlanta's Emory University are no longer allowed to seek cancer treatment -- and get it paid for by their Emory-sponsored health insurance -- at a Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA) clinic.