Over the past year and a half, keeping costs in check has helped the large hospital chains based in the Nashville area to increase quarterly earnings, even when seeing fewer patients come through their doors. The recent second quarter was no different. Cost controls fueled an 18% increase in net income at Franklin-based Community Health Systems, despite a decline in the number of patients. HCA Inc. saw fewer inpatient visits, and higher interest expense kept its pre-tax profits flat. But the Nashville-based industry leader reported an increase in overall volumes, including outpatient visits and improvements in its operating margins. Shares of publicly traded hospital chains fell ahead of the second-quarter earnings-reporting season that started this week. Reasons included investors' concern about weak patient volumes and the possibility of an increase in uninsured patients because Congress has not extended a program that has paid for 65% of the costs of COBRA health insurance for the unemployed.
With the Florida Keys struggling to provide quality healthcare, Fishermen's Hospital in Marathon hopes to find a new manager next month to revive its facility, which often has fewer than 10 patients. The facility piqued the interest of two of Miami-Dade's largest healthcare providers, but one -- leading candidate Baptist Health South Florida -- dropped out. That left a half-dozen bidders, including one that would create an affiliation with the University of Miami so that seriously ill patients at Fishermen's could be rushed by helicopter to the UM hospital. For more than 20 years, Fishermen's has been operated by the for-profit Health Management Associates, based in Naples. A fishermen's official said the hospital had a ``magnificent'' relationship with HMA until 10 years ago, when HMA changed its business model and ``things went downhill from there.'' Many Keys physicians have been upset with HMA's cost-cutting moves and have been less likely to send patients to HMA-run Fishermen's. HMA's contract expires next July.
A former San Fernando physician convicted of improperly prescribing powerful painkillers to drug addicts and undercover drug agents was sentenced Thursday to 25 years in prison and ordered to pay a $1-million fine. The sentence was justified by the scope of Masoud Bamdad's "pill mill," the seriousness of his illicit prescribing and his apparent lack of remorse, U.S. District Court Judge George Wu told the court. Wu cited the prosecution's report that for three years running — including 2008, the year of his arrest —Bamdad ranked among the state's highest prescribers of oxycodone, a powerful narcotic popularly known as "synthetic heroin." The volume of his prescriptions exceeded that of many hospitals and pain management clinics, Wu said. "The offense that was involved here is extremely serious," Wu said. "The amount of drug distributed sort of boggles the mind. And it was not victimless."
For generations of pre-med students, three things have been as certain as death and taxes: organic chemistry, physics and the Medical College Admission Test. For decades, the medical profession has debated whether pre-med courses and admission tests produce doctors who know their alkyl halides but lack the sense of mission and interpersonal skills to become well-rounded, caring, inquisitive healers. That debate is being rekindled by a study published on Thursday in Academic Medicine, the journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges. Conducted by Mount Sinai medical school in New York City, the program’s founder, Nathan Kase, MD, and the medical school’s dean for medical education, Robert Muller, MD, the peer-reviewed study compared outcomes for 85 students in the Humanities and Medicine Program with those of 606 traditionally prepared classmates from the graduating classes of 2004 through 2009, and found that their academic performance in medical school was equivalent.
Hospitals aren't known for making house calls. Once patients get their discharge papers, they take their chances with a family doctor or staffers at a clinic who may or may not know what happened inside the hospital's walls. Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx is pioneering a new model of healthcare delivery, endorsed by the architects of health reform, that promises to radically change the current fragmented system in which the family doctor may have no idea what happens during a hospital stay, or a diabetes patient's endocrinologist, internist, and cardiologist never talk to one another. As an "accountable care organization," or ACO, Montefiore, along with Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, Calif., Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MM, and a handful of other medical systems, is experimenting with a novel way to save money and improve patient outcomes by coordinating all of their care, by all of their doctors, whether in the hospital or out.
More than 80% of online nurses recommend health-related websites to their patients, according to Manhattan Research's Taking the Pulse Nurses v10.0 study. It found that these nurses encourage patients to take advantage of health and condition websites and are significantly more likely than physicians to recommend these resources to their patients. Because of this, marketers should not underestimate nurses' roles in their patients' medication and treatment plans. The study also found that the majority of online nurses report that they influence how their patients follow through with their treatment regimens.