John Castellani, announced Tuesday as the new head of PhRMA, comes to PhRMA well-positioned for Washington in 2010, as something of a hedge depending on what happens in the November midterms — on good terms with the Obama White House, but also set up nicely in case Republicans take over the House of Representatives.
The Medical Board of California has accused the Beverly Hills fertility doctor who treated octuplets mother Nadya Suleman of implanting too many embryos in another patient, causing the death of a fetus. Michael Kamrava, MD, implanted seven embryos in a 48-year-old woman identified as L.C. -- more than the medically recommended two embryos -- causing her to become pregnant with quadruplets, the board said. After complications with the pregnancy, the babies had to be delivered six weeks early by cesarean section. The mother lost one fetus during the pregnancy and another was born with “profound developmental delays,” according to a 20-page amended accusation filed June 30. “He placed L.C. at great risk … which was confirmed by a quadruplet pregnancy that ended with catastrophic results,” the document said.
Your doctor could be drunk, addicted to drugs or outright incompetent, but other physicians may not blow the whistle. A new survey finds that many American physicians fail to report troubled colleagues to authorities, believing that someone else will take care of it, that nothing will happen if they act or that they could be targeted for retribution. A surprising 17% of the doctors surveyed had direct, personal knowledge of an impaired or incompetent physician in their workplaces, said the study's lead author, Catherine DesRoches of Harvard Medical School.
For the first time in 25 years, medical experts are proposing a major change in the criteria for Alzheimer’s disease, part of a new movement to diagnose and, eventually, treat the disease earlier.The new diagnostic guidelines, presented Tuesday at an international Alzheimer’s meeting in Hawaii, would mean that new technology like brain scans would be used to detect the disease even before there are evident memory problems or other symptoms. If the guidelines are adopted in the fall, as expected, some experts predict a two- to threefold increase in the number of people with Alzheimer’s disease. Many more people would be told they probably are on their way to getting it. The Alzheimer’s Association says 5.3 million Americans now have the disease.
In this era of assembly-line appointments, when you're lucky to get 10 minutes of face time with a physician, the idea of doctors making house calls seems old-fashioned. But for frail, elderly people with multiple health problems, bringing the medical establishment to the patient makes sense. Because it's hard for these patients to get to the doctor, small problems languish and turn into larger ones. Eventually some of these people land in the emergency room or hospital. They may recover, but often the cycle starts over again. Home visits make financial sense as well, notes Jim Pyles, a Washington lawyer and member of the board of directors of the American Academy of Home Care Physicians. "We found that you could afford to treat a patient for a whole year at home by avoiding just one hospitalization," he says.
The Detroit Medical Center and its network of eight hospitals have served as a safety net for thousands of poor patients throughout southeastern Michigan. So when its pending sale to a for-profit hospital system was announced in March, there were mixed reactions about the impact on the safety net. Cash-poor non-profit hospitals, unable to borrow money for needed improvements in facilities and equipment, are eagerly seeking for-profit suitors. And for-profit hospital companies and investment firms — eyeing the improving economy and the expected influx of millions more insured Americans as a result of the new federal health overhaul law — see opportunity in the non-profit sector. But the transactions are also reigniting a long-running debate: Are the deals good for patients, or do they result in an overemphasis on profits that poses a threat to the quality of care?