State officials released data on preventable injuries and infections in Nevada hospitals Thursday that mirror the findings of a Las Vegas Sun investigation. The newspaper’s analysis of hospital billing records on file with the state has shown a wide discrepancy between the cases of patient harm detailed in those records and the number that hospitals have reported to the state as so-called sentinel events — unexpected incidents that cause injury, or the risk thereof, in a hospital. The Nevada State Health Division analysis found hospital patients suffered 342 preventable injuries or infections during the second half of 2009, while facilities reported only 44 sentinel events. Each of the 342 cases might fit Nevada’s definition of a sentinel event.
The changing makeup of the U.S. population is expected to lead to an increase in cases of glaucoma, the leading cause of vision loss in the country, experts say. A number of demographic and health trends have increased the number of Americans who fall into the major risk groups for glaucoma. And as more people become at risk, regular eye exams become increasingly important, eye experts say. Early detection of glaucoma is essential to preserving a person's sight, but eye exams are the only way to catch the disease before serious damage is done to vision.
Dennis M. Dimitri, MD, a family physician, runs a pretty unusual office. Few appointments are accepted in advance. Instead, patients call in the morning and are assigned a time slot later that day. Some patients walk in without calling ahead. The outcome of this lack of advance planning? No one has to spend weeks trying to wrangle an appointment, and once patients arrive, they rarely wait more than a few minutes for the doctor. That might seem mind-boggling to those who have cooled their heels for 30 minutes, or an hour, in their doctor’s reception room — after waiting weeks to get the appointment in the first place. It takes an average of 63 days in the Boston area to get an appointment with a family physician, according to a 2009 survey by physician recruiters Merritt Hawkins & Associates, and 20 days on average for the nation as a whole.
In a move likely to shake up the market for heart care in the Chicago area, the well-known Cleveland Clinic’s cardiac surgery program said Thursday that it has signed an affiliation agreement with Central DuPage Hospital in the western Chicago suburbs. The internationally known Cleveland Clinic draws patients from more than 85 countries around the world for everything from open-heart surgery and valve replacement to heart transplants. Its deal with Central DuPage, in Winfield, is designed to enhance the heart care provided at the 313-bed community hospital and potentially bring Cleveland Clinic patient referrals at a time heart surgeries are less needed than they were a decade ago.
When Jessica Klieger applied to 100 different residencies as a medical student last year, she had the pick of the litter. Eighty invited her for interviews, and she traveled to 15 to find the one that felt right to her: Florida Hospital. It's rare that medical students can handpick their next steppingstone, but in the cash-strapped field of family medicine, residency programs fight to capture the attention of students such as Klieger. In three years, Klieger will be one of only 77 doctors to graduate from a Florida family-medicine residency. Those programs prepare doctors to treat patients comprehensively, from babies just out of the womb to older patients struggling with end-of-life care. Florida faces the third-largest family-physicianshortage in the nation. During the next decade, the state will need 1,200 to 1,800 new primary-care physicians to keep pace with its aging-population growth.
If former vice president Richard B. Cheney's experience is similar to that of other patients who have heart pumps implanted, he has a better than 50-50 chance of surviving two years. The device, which takes over the work of the heart's main pumping chamber, should lessen discomfort and allow Cheney to do activities as strenuous as riding a bicycle. But it is far from a miracle cure for end-stage congestive heart failure, the condition from which he apparently suffers. Cheney, 69, had a left ventricular assist device implanted last week at Inova Fairfax Heart and Vascular Institute. In a statement Wednesday, Cheney said he was "entering a new phase of the disease . . . and decided to take advantage of one of the new technologies available."