USF Health and HCA Healthcare in 2010 created a statewide trauma network designed to study and improve higher-level emergency room care at suburban hospitals. The last of the five, Blake Medical Center in Bradenton, opened its trauma center six months ago. Since then, information on thousands of trauma patients has been compiled and evolved into an increasingly meaningful database, said James Hurst, medical director of the USF/HCA trauma network. The multicenter data analyses can get under way in six months, with findings published in academic journals in a year, he said.
Because of Medicare's size and position in the healthcare market, it is likely that this policy will be quickly adopted by Medicaid and private insurers. A one-year experiment with expanded competitive bidding that was recently conducted by Medicare yielded cost savings of 42 percent, without reducing the quality of care, and was hailed as a great success. But if competitive bidding is predicated on supplying equipment at the lowest possible price, something has to give. And more likely than not, that something will be patient care.
Registered nurses at a Manhattan Veterans Affairs hospital failed to notice a patient had become disconnected from a cardiac monitor until after his heart had stopped and he could not be revived, according to a report Monday from the VA inspector general. The incident from last June was the second such death at the hospital involving a patient connected to a monitor in a six-month period. The first, along with two earlier deaths at a Denver VA hospital, raised questions about nursing competency in the VA system, ProPublica reported last month. Monday's report documents the June 2011 death of patient in his 80s at the Manhattan campus of the VA’s New York Harbor Healthcare System.
A pair of studies showed hospitals could be discharging patients before they are actually healthy enough to leave. These studies from the University of Maryland looked at patient movement at a large academic hospital in the United States. The results show that the fuller a hospital is when a patient is discharged, the more likely they are to have to come back and be re-admitted. Patients let out when the hospital was busiest were 50 percent more likely to be back in within three days. The researchers said this problem is more likely at large regional hospitals and doesn't happen as often in smaller communities.
A shift last year by the federal government in how it pays for drugs to treat dialysis patients may have had an unintended and potentially dire consequence, according to new research: a significant jump in blood transfusions for patients who now may not be getting enough of the medications.
As the U.S. Senate Finance Committee launched an investigation Tuesday into makers of narcotic painkillers and groups that champion them. Sens. Max Baucus, D-Mont., the finance panel chairman, and Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, sent letters to The American Pain Foundation, three pharmaceutical companies, and five groups that support pain patients, physicians or research. The Federation of State Medical Boards, the trade group for agencies that license doctors, also received a letter, as did The Joint Commission.