As costs and the numbers of uninsured keep going up, healthcare has emerged as the most important domestic issue of 2008. This article outlines PricewaterhouseCoopers' Health Research Institute's predictions for the top eight health industry issues in 2008.
Actor Dennis Quaid said staff at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles misled him while his newborn twins were being treated there, telling him the children were "fine" while the infants were suffering from blood thinning medicine overdose. The hospital said it has taken steps to provide more training to staff and review all policies and procedures involving high-risk medication.
The new $152 million, 138-bed Adventist Bolingbrook Medical Center in Bolingbrook, IL, is now open for business and is the first non-replacement, full-service community hospital to open in Illinois since 1980. The contemporary facility with is in Will County, one of the nation's fastest growing areas. The rapid changes are affecting the local hospital landscape and, in turn, fueling political battles in the region.
The dramatic increase in the number of Americans undergoing CT scans is fueling concerns about radiation exposure from the prodedure. Some doctors say the exams could cause a small but significant excess of cancers in coming decades, spurring debate about whether the tests are being overused and exposing millions of Americans to needless risk.
Half of all emergency room patients waited 30 minutes or more before being examined by a doctor in 2004, a 36 percent increase from a median wait time of 22 minutes in 1997, according to a study by researchers at Harvard Medical School. The trend is a potentially deadly result of the shrinking number of emergency departments and rising demand for emergency services, researchers said.
When a veteran John Hopkins safety researcher assembled a checklist of proven safety procedures and required critical care doctors to use it, the results prevented infections and saved lives. The checklist, however, drew critical scrutiny from government regulators. The federal Office of Human Research Protections said using a safety checklist--and studying its effects--amounted to conducting an experiment without a patient's consent. Researchers say the dispute could delay similar safety initiatives nationwide.