Shortages of prescription drugs nearly tripled from 2005 to 2010 and reached record levels in 2011 as manufacturers ceased operations or ran into production problems. In some cases, lifesaving treatments have been delayed, sending patients on desperate searches for needed medicines, doctors say. Shortages have also caused injuries from mistakes and at least 15 deaths around the country since mid-2011, according to the Institute for Safe Medication Practices. Shortfalls are so common that pharmacy staffers at hospitals are spending many extra hours to ensure an uninterrupted flow of medicine to cancer patients, victims of heart attacks and accidents, and a host of other ill people.
A typical hospital with 200 to 300 beds wastes up to $3.8 million a year, or 9.6 percent of its total budget, on readmissions of patients who shouldn't have had to come back, says Premier, a healthcare company that advises hospitals on improving efficiency and safety. The company analyzed the records of 5.8 million incidents in which a patient went back to a hospital to be re-treated and found they added $8.7 billion a year, or 15.7 percent, to the cost of caring for those people. Cutting back on these readmissions would be good news for patients. Even if the hospital has to eat the costs of additional treatments, patients are still subject to the risks of the procedures they undergo and the normal danger of contracting an infection while in the hospital.
Mount Sinai opened its geriatric emergency department, or geri-ed, two months ago, modeling it in part after one at St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center in Paterson, N.J., which opened in 2009. Hospitals also have strong financial incentives to focus on the elderly. People over 65 account for 15 percent to 20 percent of emergency room visits, hospital officials say, and that number is expected to grow as the population ages. Under the Affordable Care Act, hospitals' Medicare payments will be tied to scores on patient satisfaction surveys and how frequently patients have to be readmitted to the hospital.
Paul Hawks, an electrician for the Florida Department of Transportation, was one of more than 4,500 people in the United States in the past 25 years who have donated a section of their liver while still alive. Death is rare—besides Paul, three other donors have died since 1999. The relatives of the other donors—they died in 1999, 2002 and 2010 —have gone public, but this is the first time Lorraine has discussed her husband's death. The Department of Public Health report gives a rare and gruesome picture of a surgical procedure gone horribly wrong. The department's account is based on medical records, operating room communications and two days of interviews with the attending transplant surgeon and other doctors, nurses and administrators.
Four major Chicago teaching hospitals have landed on a list of institutions whose patients encounter substantially more medical complications than at the average hospital, according to data evaluated by the Medicare program. Medicare's first public effort to identify hospitals with patient-safety problems has pinpointed many prestigious teaching institutions around the nation, raising concerns about quality of care but also bolstering objections that the government's measurements are skewed.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology study suggesting that more expensive hospitals in New York provided higher-quality healthcare seemed to contradict findings from the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care. Dartmouth's Jon Skinner, a researcher with the Atlas, said the two studies are looking at pretty different data. Because the MIT study looks only at data from the emergency room, it's impossible to know what happens after that initial episode of care and whether the higher spending would continue to translate into better quality. Skinner and MIT's researcher Joseph Doyle did agree on one key point: We’re not going to get better healthcare outcomes by simply throwing money at low-cost hospitals to make them high-cost hospitals.