In Minnesota, heart surgeons occasionally performed overlapping operations at hospitals roughly eight miles apart, leaving the second patient waiting under anesthesia for the doctor to arrive. In Wisconsin, a medical school paid $840,000 this year to settle a lawsuit alleging that neurosurgeons illegally billed Medicare for simultaneous spine surgeries that were largely done by unsupervised medical residents. And here in Boston, a patient at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center confronted her doctor in 2011 after learning that he had rushed her into surgery — necessitating a more powerful anesthetic than she wanted — because he was juggling two operating rooms.
A group of 32 hospitals will pay a total of $28 million to settle allegations that they submitted false claims to Medicare for a type of spinal fracture treatment, the U.S. Department of Justice said on Friday. The hospitals, located in 15 states, frequently billed Medicare for inpatient stays following a procedure known as kyphoplasty, a treatment for certain spinal fractures caused by osteoporosis, the Justice Department said. The procedure, however, can be performed in many cases on an outpatient basis, the Department said. Hospitals that agreed to some of the largest penalties in the settlement include Citrus Memorial Health System in Inverness, Florida ($2.6 million), Martin Memorial Medical Center in Stuart, Florida ($2 million), and the Ohio-based Cleveland Clinic ($1.74 million).
A friend was recently hospitalized after a bicycle accident. At one point a nursing student, together with a more senior nurse, rolled a computer on wheels into the room and asked my friend to rate her pain on a scale of 1 to 10. She mumbled, "4 to 5." The student put 5 into the computer — and then they left, without further inquiring about, or relieving, my friend's pain. This is not an anecdote about nurses not doing their jobs; it's an illustration of what our jobs have become in the age of electronic health records.
The practice of medicine has moved away from a paternalistic model toward one of collaboration between doctor and patient. This has happened as the information age, propelled by the Internet, has plunged us into an ocean of health information. In the past, doctors may have been happy with passive patients who followed orders and didn't ask questions, said Dr. Andrew Ellner, co-director of the Harvard Medical School Center for Primary Medicine. Today the most innovative medical programs recognize that such an approach does not promote optimal health outcomes for patients. "Patients need to be empowered to speak up and be partners in figuring out what's going on and designing care plans with their physicians," he said.
A new version of a screening test for ovarian cancer may reduce deaths from the disease, but it needs more study to determine whether the benefits hold up, researchers reported on Thursday. The findings come from a 14-year study of more than 200,000 women in Britain, published in The Lancet. "We need to follow up to confirm that this is absolutely significant throughout," said Dr. Usha Menon, an author of the Lancet article and head of the gynecological cancer center at University College London. She said, "This is almost there, but not yet."
While millions of Americans have gained insurance coverage since the Affordable Care Act (ACA) expanded access to health insurance coverage in January 2014, little is known about how access to and affordability of care are changing under the ACA. A new study, being released as a Web First by Health Affairs, found that between September 2013 and March 2015, there was a 3.4 percentage-point increase in the share of nonelderly adults with a connection to a health care system. Among low-income adults targeted by the ACA's Medicaid expansion provision, the increase was 5.2 percentage points.