Los Angeles County's health services director said Tuesday that he was concerned about recent patient care problems at County Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, but believes the hospital is working to prevent such incidents from happening again. The Daily Breeze reported Sunday that a psychiatric patient died and a surgical patient was injured amid mistakes last summer at the county-run trauma center near Torrance. The news has stirred concern among community leaders about the quality of care at Harbor-UCLA, the only Level I trauma center south of the Santa Monica Freeway and a key safety net hospital for the county's low-income and uninsured patients.
A psychiatric patient who refused food and water for as long as 16 days died at County Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in July after the psychiatric unit staff failed to fully monitor his condition, order a medical review or begin forced feeding, according to federal records. His death was among a string of problems at Harbor-UCLA detailed in Medicare inspection reports since 2009. It was one of two serious lapses last summer that state inspectors documented during a Sept. 13 visit. Harbor-UCLA officials said last week that they have made an array of changes to improve patient care, and inspectors determined in January that problems found during earlier visits have been resolved.
Such an incentive program for hospitals is a key provision of the U.S. healthcare overhaul law that is being challenged this week before the Supreme Court. The study looked at pay-for-performance incentives similar to those in the law and found no evidence that the program helped more patients live longer. It was published on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. "It really didn't move the needle very much on patient outcomes," said Dr. Ashish Jha, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and the study's lead author. "There was no evidence that patient outcomes got better under this different financing scheme."
Two Boston-area teams have assembled massive encyclopedias that predict the vulnerability of hundreds of different subtypes of cancer to dozens of drugs. The massive catalogs, which were made freely available online Wednesday, are an important step toward the routine personalizing of cancer care, in which patients will receive treatments tailored to the specific genetic changes that influence a tumor's response to drug regimens. Already, the data, which correlate cancer cells' genetic profiles with their sensitivity to medications, are being used to design more sophisticated early-stage clinical trials of drugs.
Peninsula Hospital in Far Rockaway will be closing its doors for good, the state Health Department said Monday, marking the end of a tumultuous six months that included the facility’s clinical laboratory recently being shuttered after investigators found 'serious deficiencies' at the site. A Health Department spokesman said the hospital is now required to submit a closure plan to the state for approval. The state did not say when it expects the hospital to close, though hospital workers said they have been told it could happen as early as Friday.
The Food and Drug Administration is taking steps to reduce "alarm fatigue" in hospitals by intensifying its pre-market review of medical devices that sound alarms and could contribute to the desensitization of nurses—a problem that The Boston Globe reported last year was linked to hundreds of deaths. Alarms on such monitors and on medication pumps, ventilators, and beds already blare endlessly in hospitals, and one of the FDA's top device officials indicated that he wants to keep new products that do not serve an important function from needlessly adding to the cacophony.