Dr. James Andrews, a widely known sports medicine orthopedist in Gulf Breeze, Fla., wanted to test his suspicion that M.R.I.'s, the scans given to almost every injured athlete or casual exerciser, might be a bit misleading. So he scanned the shoulders of 31 perfectly healthy professional baseball pitchers. The pitchers were not injured and had no pain. But the M.R.I.'s found abnormal shoulder cartilage in 90 percent of them and abnormal rotator cuff tendons in 87 percent. "If you want an excuse to operate on a pitcher's throwing shoulder, just get an M.R.I.," Dr. Andrews says.
During his two-year stint as National Coordinator of Health IT, Dr. David Blumenthal oversaw the development and implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act's $27 billion HITECH Act stimulus programs to encourage the adoption and "meaningful use" of electronic health records by hundreds of thousands U.S. hospitals and clinicians. Blumenthal--a former primary care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital--left his Office of National Coordinator job in April to return to his tenured post at Harvard. InformationWeek Healthcare senior writer Marianne Kolbasuk McGee caught up with Blumenthal at the recent Partners Healthcare's Connected Health Symposium in Boston.
The rapid movement toward electronic health records (EHRs) may unwittingly raise physician risk for malpractice lawsuits and push liability insurers to raise their premiums, a new report suggests. EHRs may reduce the medical liability for certain errors, but it appears they "both create new forms of medical liability and expose existing liability issues in the healthcare environment that might otherwise remain unknown," says a white paper published by the AC Group, a Montgomery, Texas, health IT research and consulting firm. The paper calls on federal officials to slow the pace of the federal Meaningful Use incentive program to get medical practices and hospitals to use EHRs.
In Walter Isaacson's biography of Apple CEO Steve Jobs that went on sale Monday, there's some fascinating detail about Jobs' stay in Memphis during 2009, when he got a liver transplant at Methodist University Hospital's transplant institute. Jobs, who died earlier this month at age 56, was ever the details man, even in his hospital bed. There's a moment in the book's recounting of Jobs' transplant when Jobs pulled off an oxygen mask, grumbled about the design and ordered someone to bring him five different choices of masks. He said he'd pick the one he liked. Same for the oxygen monitor on his finger.
Eye surgeons in Tennessee have begun a pre-emptive offensive against legislation to allow optometrists the right to do laser surgeries—even though optometrists say they aren't seeking any law change. Lasers are replacing scalpels in eye surgery with procedures that range from saving a patient's sight to freeing them from eyeglasses. Computer programs make some of those procedures seem as easy as pushing a button, but a laser is just as dangerous as a knife, said Rebecca J. Taylor, MD, a Nashville ophthalmologist. "You laser the wrong area and in an instant you render someone blind and it's not retrievable," said Taylor, a medical doctor who completed a surgical residency at Vanderbilt University to become an ophthalmologist. She and other leaders with the Tennessee Academy of Ophthalmology—the organization that represents the surgeons—worry legislators here will follow Kentucky's example. That state passed a law this year allowing optometrists to do surgical procedures, including some using lasers, that were previously limited to ophthalmologists. Optometrists already have an ally in the legislature. Rep. Gary Odom, D-Nashville, is the executive director of their organization.
Illinois patients can now research their doctors using an online database the state launched Wednesday. The idea is to take the guesswork out of choosing a doctor by allowing easier access to information about the state's 46,000 licensed physicians and surgeons. The database can be accessed through the Department of Financial and Professional Regulation's website at idfpr.com. There, patients can learn about a doctor's educational background and training, determine what type of insurance they accept and find out what languages are spoken in the office. Also included is information regarding criminal convictions, whether hospital privileges have been revoked and disciplinary action against the doctor by regulators in Illinois and other states. Sponsoring Rep. Mary Flowers, D-Chicago, said the measure will protect patients from seeking out treatment from shady doctors who put lives at risk.