As in other industries, area hospitals like MetroWest Medical say they want to build personal relationships with customers, by embracing the conveniences of the electronic age and turning their solo acts into partnerships with patients. Most have tapped social media tools like Facebook and Twitter to spur those conversations, though only one other local provider, Newton-Wellesley Hospital, plans to harness mobile phones.
"It's amazing what phones can do these days," said Brian O'Dea, the hospital's director of marketing and public affairs.
By early fall, Newton-Wellesley plans to offer a free application for patients to download to their smart phones, with the software program featuring not only emergency room wait times updated every five minutes, but also searches for doctors and registration for services like lab tests and radiology scans.
If you want to examine a Missouri hospital's infection rates before last year, don't bother looking for the information on the state health department's website or requesting a copy of the government records.
State health officials have deleted the data. And no electronic or paper records of the older information are available.
The deleted material, collected from 2005 through 2008, is too costly to maintain and too sensitive for the public to review for more than a year, state officials say.
Without access to infection data from previous years, consumers won't be able to adequately assess a hospital's performance in preventing infections, consumer advocates say. Specifically, the policy of the Department of Health and Senior Services makes it difficult to review how hospitals have performed over time and whether they perform consistently above or below the national average.
A Manhattan-based primary care physician named as the leader of a nine-person drug ring for which she wrote nearly $1 million in oxycodone prescriptions was arrested last week, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
Diana Williamson, MD, is said to have written $4.39 million worth of prescriptions paid for by Medicaid, and of those, $997,128 was attributable to about 11,000 oxycontin pills in a fraud scheme, according to a U.S. DEA statement. Federal officials said she wrote the oxycodone prescriptions for patients who had no medical need for them between September, 2009 and August, 2010.
"Diana Williamson allegedly exploited her medical license by engaging in a scheme to prescribe profits for herself and her co-conspirators," said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. "In doing so, she betrayed the practice of medicine and moreover, cheated an already-strapped Medicaid system out of almost a million dollars."
Bharara said the conspiracy represents a "big money drain that fraud is to the multi-billion dollar healthcare industry."
The oath to 'do no harm' is turned on its head when a doctor's prescription pad is used for drug dealing," said New York City Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly.
The patients were allegedly recruited by another defendant in the case, Lenny Hernandez, who is said to have helped the individuals fill the prescriptions. He also arranged to sell the drugs to third parties.
Three other defendants, Miguel Angel Hernandez, Franmi Saeta and Ivette Arroyo allegedly assisted Lenny Hernandez in obtaining and distributing the oxycodone. Two other defendants, Antonio Martinez and Carl Guilford, obtained oxycodone prescriptions from Williamson, "despite having no medical need for the medication, then used their government-provided health benefit to fill the prescriptions," prosecutors charge.
The defendants are charged with one count of conspiracy to distribute and possession with intent to distribute a controlled substance, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a maximum fine of $1 million. Williamson, Hernandez, and two other defendants are also charged with one count of conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a maximum fine of $25,000.
Other named defendants include Reynoldo Colon and Junior Jaquez. All but Jaquez, who remains at large, were arrested, according to the DEA statement.
Cardiologist Eric Topol, director of Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, is a leading advocate of using a rapidly expanding array of genetic tests to screen patients for drug complications. Topol says that most physicians don’t take advantage of this new medical advance. He explored the potential consequences for patients in a commentary published Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine. He wrote this article explaining his views for the Union-Tribune.
About 65 million Americans live in communities with a shortage of primary care doctors, physicians trained to meet the majority of patients' health care needs over the course of their lives. How much more difficult will finding a primary care doctor become as a result of the recently passed health care reform legislation, which will extend coverage to an estimated 34 million currently uninsured Americans by 2019? Massachusetts, which in 2006 passed a law that led to nearly universal coverage of its 6.6 million residents, might provide some clues. In that state, fewer and fewer internists and family practice doctors are taking new patients, and wait times to see family practice doctors are lengthening, according to the Massachusetts Medical Society and the non-profit Massachusetts Health Quality Partners.
Carilion Clinic owns the two hospitals in Roanoke, VA, and six others in the region, employs 550 doctors and has set off a bitter local debate: Is its dominance a new model for health care or a blatant attempt to corner the market? Carilion says it represents an ideal envisioned by the nation's new healthcare law: a network that increases efficiency by bringing more doctors and hospitals onto one team, integrating care from the doctor's office to the operating room. The name for such networks, which the new law strongly promotes with pilot programs, is accountable care organizations, or ACOs -- providers joining together to be "accountable" for the total care of patients, with incentives from insurers to keep people healthy and costs down.