A new Pacific Northwest medical school has celebrated its opening. The College of Osteopathic Medicine plans to send primary care doctors to serve in rural and low-income areas in a five-state region. Seventy percent of the students are from the Pacific Northwest. The college already has agreements with hospitals, clinics and doctors in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana to provide clinical training to students in their third and fourth years.
After patients complained for years about valuables disappearing, in 2006 Atlanta's Grady Memorial Hospital tightened its policy about the handling of patients' valuables. But property continued to vanish: There were 260 thefts involving patients, employees and visitors in 2007, compared with 262 in 2006 and 279 in 2005. Now
hospital officials are, once again, changing Grady's security policy regarding patients' valuables.
Neighborhood opponents of a new hospital in Montgomery County's East Norriton Township in Pennsylvania have withdrawn two legal challenges to the project, according to representatives for Albert Einstein Healthcare Network. Einstein and Montgomery Hospital are working together to build a $300 million, 192-bed hospital. Two people who live near the proposed facility had filed challenges to a change in zoning regulations.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has ruled that doctors can be held liable for negligence that reduces a patient's chance of survival, even if the patient's prospect for recovery was already less than 50%. Medical malpractice lawyers said the decision could help patients who previously had little chance of collecting damages from physicians. The ruling came in a case in which a jury had awarded a $1 million judgment to the family of a man whose stomach cancer was overlooked by a doctor. The court recognized for the first time a doctrine known as "loss of chance," which allows a patient whose odds of recovery are 50% or less to receive damages for any negligence that reduced those odds.
Procure Treatment Centers Inc., a private company that wants to build a proton therapy cancer treatment center in Warrenville, IL, has sued Northern Illinois University for its efforts to build a similar facility in nearby West Chicago. Procure Treatment Centers Inc. accuses NIU of abusing the state's regulatory system to stifle competition in the healthcare market, according to the lawsuit. The company, which has partnered with Central DuPage Hospital on the proton therapy facility project, accuses NIU of violating the Illinois Antitrust Act and wants to know who helped NIU in its appearances before the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board, the state agency that regulates healthcare construction.
Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama has vowed that he will lower the country's healthcare costs enough to "bring down premiums by $2,500 for the typical family." Obama has also promised that his health plan will be in place "by the end of my first term as president of the United States." But whether he can deliver is a matter of dispute among health analysts and economists.