Tom Ozburn is excited about his new position as chief executive officer at Southern Hills Medical Center in Nashville, TN, and is looking forward to expanding the facility's reach. Southern Hills has established family care offices in Brentwood and Nolensville, and Ozburn said there would be a continued focus on reaching those markets because residents there are geographically closer to Southern Hills Medical Center than to any other hospital.
The decision by Christopher T. Olivia, MD, to take the chief executive position at West Penn Allegheny Health System of Pittsburgh has delivered a setback to Boston's Caritas Christi Health Care System. Olivia was the top candidate to take over the troubled six-hospital Caritas Christi. In a statement, James J. Karam, chairman of Caritas Christi's board of governors, said the chain would select a chief executive "in the coming weeks."
In a recently released study, researchers found that depending on the organ needed, residents of rural areas were 10 to 20 percent less likely to get a transplant. The study reviewed approximately 175,000 patients who were on waiting lists for heart, kidney or liver transplants from 1999 to 2004.
Most doctors agree that medical errors should be reported to their hospitals, but a significant number admit they don't always report their own, according to a study by researchers frm the University of Iowa. Seventeen percent of doctors surveyed admitted hat they had failed to report minor errors, defined as mistakes that "prolonged treatment or caused discomfort." Four percent admitted they had failed to report mistakes that "caused disability or death," the survey found.
Alabama's nurse practitioner rules limit their ability to write prescriptions and require them to be paired with a collaborating physician. But a proposed bill drafted by the Nurse Practitioners Alliance of Alabama would relax the rules and make it easier for trained nurse practitioners to work in poor, rural counties where medical care is scarce.
A developer plans to buy a vacant office building in New Orleans and refurbish it for use by doctors, insurance companies and others who will do business at two new hospitals the state and federal governments plan to build in the city's downtown. The project is one of several since Louisiana State University and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs announced plans to build affiliated medical centers in New Orleans.