As state and federal officials increasingly search for ways to curb rising health care costs, a decades-old idea is gaining traction: helping people with challenges that have nothing to do with medical care but everything to do with their health. Insurers are taking steps as simple as paying for hot meal deliveries and outreach to homebound people and replacing air filters in homes with asthmatic children.
Maryland officials say a doctor will pay about $3 million to settle civil liability claims from improperly billing Medicaid programs in Maryland and Delaware and the Medicare program. Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh said Monday that the settlement was reached with Zahid Aslam. He owned medical practices in Maryland and Delaware.
From the outside, the new Bayfront Health building in Pinellas Park looks like a typical medical clinic. With its brick facade and modest parking lot, it could be an urgent care center or a doctor's office. But it's actually a free-standing emergency room, equipped to handle much more critical cases. The facility at Gandy Boulevard and Interstate 275 is the first of its kind for Bayfront Health, which operates a traditional emergency room just a few miles away at its downtown St. Petersburg hospital.
Thousands of Kaiser Permanente mental health workers plan to go on a five-day strike beginning Monday, Dec. 10, staging pickets around California and drawing attention to what they call a critical staff shortage and unequal benefits. Roughly 4,000 psychologists, therapists, social workers, psychiatric nurses and other medical professionals represented by the National Union of Healthcare Workers will demonstrate through Friday, Dec. 14, according to the union.
A recent University of Iowa study projects a shortage of physician assistants as 32 percent of the state's PAs were age 50 or older in 2015 and may retire within the next 15 years. This has the potential to compound difficulties for health care institutions across the state which are already facing a shortage of primary care physicians going forward, especially in many rural areas which have become more reliant on PAs to meet the growing needs of an aging population.
As burning ash and black smoke eclipsed six lanes of terrified motorists fleeing the worst fire in California history, Elizabeth Steffen was driving in the wrong direction. Steffen, the director of the SacValley Medshare health information exchange, rushed down Route 99 to Oroville Hospital last month on a single-minded mission: to turn an electronic switch enabling medical records to follow 200 patients evacuated in a mad scramble from a burning hospital and nursing home in Paradise, a town that would soon be annihilated by the Camp Fire.