Milford (MA) Regional Medical Center has reached out to its non-medical personnel and volunteers to encourage them to wash their hands while moving about the hospital and installed hand sanitizing stations near patients' rooms to encourage visitors to keep their germs away from hospitalized loved ones. The hospital is now trying to take its in-house campaign outside its borders to towns within its service area.
Two recent federal reports on hospital quality agreed that hospitals in Florida, on average, fall below the national norm. Hospital care in Florida was rated "weak" relative to the rest of the country by the congressionally mandated Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Just days later, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services posted patient-satisfaction scores on its Web site for virtually every U.S. hospital. On average, Florida hospitals lagged the nation in all of the 10 listed categories-from patients' overall rating of their hospital experience to their satisfaction with staff communication, pain management and room cleanliness.
This commentary in the The Washington Times says that the hospital-acquired infection rates reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Infection are much lower than reality. The CDC claims 1.7 million people contract infections in U.S. hospitals each year, but new facts discredit this estimate, the author writes.
It's been more than eight years since To Err is Human detailed just how deadly hospital errors can be to patients, writes the director of the Center for Medical Consumers in this op-ed piece, but progress in changing the likelihood of a patient being harmed has been just too slow. The error epidemic is not just costly in lives lost: The economic impact is estimated to be between $17- and $29 billion dollars as a result of lost income as well as disability and healthcare costs, he writes.
Alliance (OH) Community Hospital has announced that it will offer patients from the Ohio-based facilities Mercy Medical Center, Robinson Memorial Hospital or Salem Community Hospital $100 or more to hand over their bills and corresponding "explanation of benefits." Alliance representatives said the offer is part of the hospital's attempt to provide consumers with more information about the true cost of medical services. The hospital will eventually share the information on a new Web site.
Corporate and government documents from Vioxx lawsuits indicate that Merck & Co. apparently downplayed evidence showing the painkiller tripled the risk of death in Alzheimer's-prone patients. Doctors involved in the analyses say the trove of information that Merck was compelled to produce offers a window into the world of billion-dollar drugs and the lengths to which a company will go to advance and protect its interests.