The California-based foundation X-Prize, which helped launch the first private manned space flight in 2004, is teaming with the insurer WellPoint Inc. to try to fix the U.S. healthcare system. The companies have announced an open competition to devise solutions that improve healthcare cost and quality, with a $10 million prize for the winner. Essentially, the competition will look for ways to "dramatically improve" cost and quality, said Brad Fluegel, a WellPoint executive vice president.
The Rhode Island Health Department has reprimanded Providence-based Miriam Hospital, after identifying a confluence of missteps that led a surgical team to operate on the wrong knee of a patient undergoing elective surgery. The staff failed to look for the surgeon's mark on the patient's skin, the "yes" that indicated which side needed surgery. But there were other problems as well, including marking surgical sites with ink that sometimes rubs off and failing to verify the surgical site against the original source of information.
When confronted with patients who are stressed out and showing signs of heart problems, family physicians and internists are more likely to chalk up the symptoms to anxiety if the sufferer is female, according to a study. When the patients didn't complain of a specific and recent source of stress in their lives, there was no difference in the way men and women were diagnosed for heart disease or referred to a cardiologist. The findings were presented at the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics meeting in Washington, DC.
Up to 1,600 residents in the Louisville, KY, neighborhood known as Rubbertown at risk of cardiovascular disease could get free screenings and preventive counseling from University of Louisville medical teams through a grant from the Anthem Foundation. The $600,000 grant also will pay for research into possible links between environmental pollutants and heart disease. The screenings will be a follow-up to 2007's free screening program in western and southwestern Louisville.
The nation's top epidemiological societies have joined with the American Hospital Association and the Joint Commission to issue a compendium of guidelines for preventing six lethal conditions. The recommended practices do not vary in significant ways from the encyclopedic guidelines issued and revised over the last two decades by a government advisory panel. But their authors said they had been written more clearly and concisely, with advice not only on what hospitals should do, but also on what they should not, and on secondary approaches to try if first-line measures do not lower infection rates.
The Pennsylvania Senate has adjourned for the year without reauthorizing the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council, an independent state agency that helped pioneer public reporting of hospital quality and costs. The agency has been operating under an executive order since July, when its reauthorization bill was entangled in an unrelated political fight between Gov. Ed Rendell and Senate Republicans over the governor's proposal to offer health insurance to many of the state's 800,000 uninsured adults. This summer, Rendell rejected a bill to reauthorize the agency that included an extension of subsidies to doctors for their medical malpractice coverage.