In a letter to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Don Berwick, MD, the American Hospital Association urged CMS to require consistent designations of healthcare-acquired conditions across states and to relax deadlines in the proposed regulation for Medicaid HACs. The association's recommendations include the following: CMS and states should use the Medicare HACs list as the sole source from which the Medicaid HACs may be selected. Lists of HACs that vary from state to state would make it extremely difficult to manage interstate health systems, so AHA "strongly recommends" that CMS and states focus on a core set of conditions for consistency.
A dangerous drug-resistant bacterium has reached Southern California healthcare facilities, according to a study released Thursday by Los Angeles County public health officials. Researchers found 356 cases of carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae, or CRKP, at healthcare facilities in Los Angeles County, mostly among elderly patients, said author Dr. Dawn Terashita, a medical epidemiologist with the county Department of Public Health."We think that this is increasing," Jonathan E. Fielding, MD, the county?s public health chief, said of the infections. The county health department required facilities to report the infections starting June 1, 2010, and Terashita analyzed reports through Dec. 31, 2010, filed by 52 hospitals and a regional lab. She found 146 infections at eight long-term acute-care hospitals, including an outbreak at one hospital, she said. Another 20 cases were reported at nursing homes and the remainder at short-term acute-care hospitals.
A Las Vegas Valley urologist whose medical license has been suspended for reusing single-use needle guides blames an unnamed equipment vendor for suggesting he could do so, according to a paid advertisement in the Review-Journal. The ad, produced by Dr. Michael Kaplan's attorney, Dominic Gentile, appears on Page 3B of the Nevada section. Kaplan's medical license was suspended nine days ago by the Nevada State Board of Medical Examiners after a joint investigation with the Food and Drug Administration, the federal agency that regulates the use of medical devices. Authorities said that for three months, Kaplan reused single-use-only plastic needle guides for prostate/rectal biopsies, discarding them only when they became "too bloody."
Most newborns have their hearing tested while they are still in the hospital, but those tests may not catch all severe hearing loss. One-third of children who were treated for deafness with cochlear implants had actually passed the newborn screening, according to a new study. That's important, because parents and pediatricians often don't realize that a baby has a serious hearing problem. Most states require that newborns' hearing be tested before they go home from the hospital. About 2 or 3 of every 1,000 children are born deaf or hard of hearing. The earlier those children get help, the better they do at developing language skills. Researchers at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago looked at the records of 127 children who had hearing problems severe enough to be treated with cochlear implants, and found that one-third of them had passed the newborn hearing test. The results were published in the latest Archives of Otolaryngology ? Head and Neck Surgery.
An older kind of Lap-Band weight-loss surgery could lead to severe complications over the long haul, Belgian researchers said. The surgery works by placing a silicone band around the top portion of the stomach to restrict food intake. It has become an increasingly popular option in the battle against obesity, but some experts have worried about its safety. The Belgian team found that as many as half their patients, followed for at least 12 years, needed to have the band removed in that period. And in more than a quarter, the band had gnawed its way through the wall of the stomach. "The high failure rate of (Lap-Band surgery), at least in our hands, could be detrimental to its future continued widespread use as a restrictive weight loss operation," Jacques Himpens, MD, of the Saint Pierre University Hospital in Brussels and colleagues write in the Archives of Surgery.
Although nearly 80% of domestic violence victims who report the incidents to police seek healthcare in emergency rooms, as many as 72% are not identified as victims of abuse. Of those who are, very few are offered adequate support. These findings from a new study point to a missed opportunity to intervene and offer help to women who suffer violence at the hands of an intimate partner. Karin V. Rhodes, MD, directs the Division of Emergency Care Policy Research in the department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. She says "Emergency departments are a safety net for women with health issues of all kinds, but our study shows we're not doing a good enough job of assessing our patients' entire situation."