San Diego County hospitals performing heart bypass surgery met state expectations in 2005, with risk-adjusted death rates close to California's average of 3.08 percent. But the number of bypasses has declined rapidly, according to an annual report released yesterday by the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development. Surgeons performed fewer than 17,000 heart bypass surgeries at California hospitals in 2006--down 43 percent from 1997. In contrast, the number of angioplasty procedures, including insertion of tiny scaffolds called stents into arteries, exceeded 60,000 that year.
In this provacative opinion piece, Robert Goldberg, vice president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, argues that Medicare and CMS cutbacks in reimbursements for crucial cancer fighting drugs could lead to a serious loss of lives. "Fewer drugs. Fewer seniors," he writes. "Maybe that should be Medicare's slogan for the future."
Kaiser Permanente has launched a two-year, $600,000 analysis of 175,000 patient records to spot what doctors do right--or wrong--in preventing cardiovascular disease, the nation's leading cause of death and disability. The project is funded by a federal agency and harnesses the HMO's massive database of electronic patient records, aims to ease the burden of the disease on individuals, as well as on the nation's coffers.
An ongoing pattern of medical errors and neglectful care contributed to as many as 21 deaths this year in Georgia's state psychiatric hospitals. These deaths occurred amid intense scrutiny of the hospitals' performance. The seven state-run facilities remain overcrowded and understaffed, and patients are dying under circumstances similar to those that led to more than 100 other questionable deaths in the previous five years, including overmedication and misdiagnosed bowel obstruction.
Over the past decade, public reporting on healthcare performance has become increasingly common. But whereas most reporting has concentrated on the quality of care in health maintenance organizations, hospitals, or large medical practices, healthcare purchasers are now focusing on identifying which individual physicians deliver good care most efficiently.
Two major German health insurance companies have presented new hospital search engines for citizens in order to increase transparency of the German healthcare system. Both services include quality data on medical interventions. The engines with sift through the larger quality reports made by hospitals and present users with the pertinent information.