Continuing to mold a new team to lead the Miami-based Jackson Health System, Chief Executive Eneida Roldan said she is bringing in a new vice president of business development and hopes to have a new chief operating officer by the end of the year. Mike Casanova, a veteran South Florida healthcare consultant, will lead the effort to bring in new business, a key because Miami-Dade's government system hopes to find new ways to bring in revenue to make up for losses from treating growing numbers of the uninsured, the Miami Herald reports. Casanova has been an executive with Surgical Park in Miami and PCA Health Plans of Florida.
Despite new recommendations that most women start breast screening at 50 rather than 40, many doctors told the New York Times that they were simply not ready to make such a drastic change. The recommendations, issued by a federal advisory panel, reversed widely promoted guidelines and were intended to reduce overtreatment. The panel said the benefits of screening women in their 40s were outweighed by the potential for unnecessary tests and treatment, and the accompanying anxiety. Several doctors said that while they understood the panel's risk-benefit analysis, their patients would not see it that way, the Times reports.
If the U.S. obesity rates continues to rise, obesity will cost the United States about $344 billion in medical-related expenses by 2018, eating up about 21% of healthcare spending, according to an analysis. These calculations are based on the projection that in 10 years 43% of Americans adults may be obese, which is roughly 30 or more pounds over a healthy weight. A study released in July showed that obese Americans cost the country about $147 billion in weight-related medical bills in 2008, double what it was a decade ago. It now accounts for about 9.1% of medical spending.
The Philadelphia VA Medical Center was cited for eight apparent violations in using radioactive materials on nearly 100 veterans, federal inspectors have concluded. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission found that the Philadelphia VA staff failed to evaluate radiation doses or know when to report a mistake, according to a 16-page report. The brachytherapy team, for example, failed to check radiation doses for more than a year because a computer was unplugged from the hospital's network, the report said.
A core tenet of the healthcare overhaul President Obama is pushing through Congress is that medical care can be improved, and costs contained, if the country relies more on experts to determine which procedures and treatments work best, the Los Angeles Times reports. But an expert panel's recommendation that women in their 40s should no longer get annual mammograms to screen for breast cancer sparked an outcry from those who say that the federal government is more interested in saving money than in improving women's health. Some Republicans jumped on the report as the kind of government intervention in medical decisions that Obama's healthcare plan would bring, reports the Times.
Senator Charles E. Grassley wrote to 10 top medical schools to ask what they are doing about professors who put their names on ghostwritten articles in medical journals and why that practice was any different from plagiarism by students. Grassley said ghostwriting had hurt patients and raised costs for taxpayers because it used prestigious academic names to promote medical products and treatments that might be expensive or less effective than viable alternatives, reports the New York Times.