Kansas City hospitals have not yet succumbed to a flurry of layoffs, but administrators say they are in the middle of choppy waters trying to avoid them. Income is faltering because investments are down, government aid is dropping, and patient volume has dipped. Now hospitals are struggling with having to care for a growing number of patients who cannot pay their bills.
The board of directors for Towson, MD-based St. Joseph Medical Center has appointed an outside executive to run the Towson hospital during a federal investigation of its financial dealings with an affiliated doctors group. Beth O'Brien, senior vice president for operations at the Denver-based Catholic Health Initiative, which owns St. Joseph and 71 other hospitals, was named to the post. Three unnamed hospital executives have stepped down from their jobs to avoid a conflict of interest during the inquiry.
Seattle Children's plan to more than double the number of beds and building sizes on its Laurelhurst campus between now and 2030 is either a needed expansion sensitively balanced with community concerns or an unnecessarily massive proposal whose effects cannot be mitigated. Those were the two views presented at the opening of a Seattle hearing examiner hearing on the proposal.
Cancer doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital plan within a year to read the genetic fingerprints of nearly all new patients' tumors to customize treatment. The goal is to spare patients from the traditional approach to cancer care, when expensive drugs with harmful side effects are often given without knowing whether they will work.
As a conversation about healthcare reform intensifies, much of the focus is on the role the government and insurance companies will play in a revamped health system. But surprisingly little attention has been paid to the role that patients and their doctors have played in shaping the way medical care is delivered, according to this article in the New York Times. Ultimately, for any reform to work, patients will have to change their behavior, the article states.
Dentists are in such short supply in Maine that primary care doctors who do their medical residency in the state are learning to perform basic dental skills through a program that began in 2005. In Maine, training physicians in dentistry provides a dental safety net for the rural poor who have never had one, doctors and dentists said. About two-thirds of the residents who have trained at the dental clinic now practice in the state, many in rural areas.