The cardiac intensive care unit at Egleston children's hospital in Atlanta gleams and hums with a dazzling array of scientific wonders that breathe for tiny lungs and monitor every beat of an infant heart. But on a recent visit, Dr. Donald Berwick was especially pleased by something decidedly low-tech: a quiet zone where nurses can place medication orders without being interrupted, even during emergencies. Hospital leaders created the zone -- little more than a computer terminal in a corner of the room behind an orange sign on the floor that reads "Shh … We're in the MedZone" -- two years ago after noticing that distracted staff members were making dangerous mistakes when ordering medicine. The deceptively simple system, built on a principle used in aviation, cut medication errors by two-thirds, saving money and lives.
The nation's worst hospitals treat twice the proportion of elderly black patients and poor patients than the best hospitals, and their patients are more likely to die of heart attacks and pneumonia, new research shows. Now, these hospitals, mostly in the South, may be at higher risk of financial failure, too. That's because the nation's new healthcare law punishes bad care by withholding some money, says the lead author of the study published Wednesday in the journal Health Affairs. "These hospitals are going to have a much harder time in the new funding environment," said Dr. Ashish Jha of the Harvard School of Public Health, who led the study. "I worry they're going to get worse over time and possibly even fail. I worry that we're going to see a bunch of that happening over next three to five years."
A procedure that treats hard-to-control high blood pressure by delivering low-power radio-frequency energy through a catheter to surrounding nerves near the kidneys is being hailed as the medical innovation of the year, chosen from nearly 150 candidates by physicians at the Cleveland Clinic. The top 10 medical innovations for 2012 are being announced at the Clinic's ninth annual Innovation Summit. The groundbreaking medical inroads chosen hit almost every aspect of healthcare, from new treatments for diabetes and brain aneurysms, to technical advances that detect concussions in athletes, to the management of computerized medical data. The innovation of wearable robotic devices has implications far beyond helping patients with lower leg amputations resulting from disease, obesity and military injuries: It can help others design joint replacements that more effectively mimic natural movement, said Dr. Wael Barsoum, the Clinic's vice chair for orthopedic surgery."
Companies that buy up critical drugs in short supply and resell them to hospitals and pharmacies at a markup of as much as 80 times their price are under investigation by a U.S. lawmaker challenging the practice. While so-called gray-market resellers can offer life-saving drugs that are in low supply, they charge the typical contract price sevenfold on average, with some surgical and other medically critical treatments increasing 20-fold, according to a survey by the Premier Healthcare Alliance. Representative Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat, launched the investigation as the U.S. faces record drug shortages. The scarcity is causing some hospitals to change medical practices and in some cases, use less-effective medicines, doctors and pharmacists say. Cummings said he found that one reseller charged a hospital 80 times the typical price for cytarabine, a pediatric cancer drug.
The California Department of Public Health has dismissed findings against Prime Healthcare Services over its documentation of bloodstream infections, saying the department lacked evidence to cite hospitals over incomplete or inaccurate medical records. But in a six-page analysis of the decision to rescind the findings, the department said it had not ruled out possible fraud as an explanation for high rates of septicemia. Kathleen Billingsley, deputy director of the Department of Public Health, said findings of the February septicemia inspections and just-completed malnutrition reports have been forwarded to Medi-Cal auditors and the federal Health and Human Services Department's Office of Inspector General. "It's their responsibility to look at billing issues," Billingsley said in an interview. "That is specifically what they do." Prime Healthcare, a 14-hospital chain based in Ontario, CA, declared the decision a victory.
Hospitals that meet performance standards for treating kids with asthma aren't any better at keeping those kids from showing up in the emergency room with asthma problems in the future, according to new research. The results call into question whether the standards, used to grade the hospitals on their asthma care, are helpful if they don't translate into real patient improvements, researchers said. Specifically, hospitals following so-called process measures that encourage sending young asthma patients home with a plan for managing their condition did not result in the kids having fewer hospitalizations and ER trips. The problem, researchers said, may be that there's no way to make sure those asthma management plans were explained in a way that families understood, or that they followed doctors' recommendations at discharge.