Medicine is slow to move, and that's especially true with breast cancer. Doctors are up against not only new data but also an accumulated mass of public opinion seeded by policymakers and advocacy groups with strong positions on how best to screen for and treat breast cancer. These measures were put into place for good reason, of course–because experts thought they would save lives. But they didn't–or at least not as many as anticipated. This year more than 40,000 women in the U.S. will die of breast cancer.
Family physicians are frustrated with gaps in training for treatment of opioid addiction, as well as lack of access for patients and barriers to prescribing, and they are taking that frustration to the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) Congress of Delegates meeting here.
Helping patients communicate their symptoms clearly could go a long way toward making an accurate diagnosis, John Ely, MD, MPH, said at the annual meeting of the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine.
Injuries from accidents and violence cost the United States $671 billion in 2013, with men accounting for far more of those costs than women, federal health officials reported Wednesday. Fatal injuries cost $214 billion and nonfatal injuries cost $457 billion. The amounts include lifetime health and work loss costs for fatal and nonfatal injuries treated in hospitals and emergency departments, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Injuries cost Americans far too much money, suffering and preventable death," CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden said in an agency news release. "The doubling of deaths by drug poisoning, including prescription drug overdose and heroin, is particularly alarming."
In Alabama, a positive drug test can have dire repercussions for pregnant women and new mothers. Their newborns can be taken from them. They can lose custody of their other children. They can face lengthy sentences in the most notorious women's prison in the United States and thousands of dollars in fees and fines. Yet the hospitals that administer those drug tests — and turn the results over to authorities — are exceedingly reluctant to disclose their policies to the public. In many cases, they test mothers and babies without explicit consent and without warning about the potential consequences, ProPublica and AL.com have found.
Cleveland Clinic has a long history of measuring and reporting data on health outcomes, most famously in our Outcomes Books, the yearly reports on how patients treated in our different departments fare. We've realized that you cannot improve something if you don't measure it and share what you find — so in that vein, I'd like to share some of our experiences in building this system at Cleveland Clinic. We began tracking clinical outcomes for cardiac patients in 1979, and have been using such data to facilitate accountability and learning since 1989. In 1998, we began publishing and distributing that data to referring physicians.