Since 2006, an obscure panel of 11 citizens has been serving as Washington's scientific watchdog on medical issues. Its mission is to review clinical evidence on potentially questionable medical technologies and decide whether their track records and costs merit coverage by state agencies. The Health Technology Assessment program has so far ruled against covering three procedures: the virtual colonoscopy, the upright MRI, and discography. Two other procedures, pediatric bariatric surgery and lumbar-fusion surgery for back pain, were approved with restrictions.
New York City's Health and Hospitals Corporation has agreed to increase the monitoring of patients at a public psychiatric ward in Brooklyn. The agreement came after a videotape surfaced showing a patient collapsing onto a floor at Kings County Hospital Center after waiting nearly 24 hours to be seen, and lying there for about an hour before somebody came to her aid. The agency agreed to the stepped-up monitoring to settle a lawsuit filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union and others. The lawsuit accuses the public hospital of keeping psychiatric patients in filthy conditions, systematically neglecting them, and drugging them into submission.
Edith Isabel Rodriguez writhed for 45 minutes on the floor of the emergency room lobby at Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital in Los Angeles as staffers walked past and a janitor mopped around her. The infamous incident in May 2007 was captured by a security camera, but the Los Angeles County has insisted for more than a year that the tape is "confidential, official information." Now, however, excerpts of the grainy video were sent anonymously to the Los Angeles Times and are available on the newspaper's website.
Video from a surveillance camera at a Brooklyn, NY, hospital shows a woman dying on the floor of a psychiatric emergency room while being ignored by other patients and hospital staff. The video was released by lawyers suing Kings County Hospital alleging neglect and abuse of mental health patients. The video shows the 49-year-old woman keeling over and falling out of her chair and lying facedown on the floor, then thrashing before going still. About an hour passed before someone tried to help.
Bar codes were long touted as the perfect solution to medication mistakes in hospitals. But bar codes make new problems and aren't the panacea that safety advocates expected, according to a research team at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Bar coding has not yet been proven to reduce medication errors, and often the shortcuts that caregivers develop undermine its effectiveness, the researchers found.
The third report since 2004 on how California hospitals treat pneumonia found that patients at the worst- performing hospitals were twice as likely to die as those at the best-ranked hospitals. Los Angeles County is in decent shape, with 20 of 92 hospitals surveyed that rated "better than expected" and four that rated "worse than expected." The report looked at 30-day mortality rates for community- acquired pneumonia between January 2003 and November 2005.