Tampa, FL-based African Ambassadors began serving the community in 2003 with only two doctors, a nurse and slim funding. It has since helped nearly 2,000 patients who can't afford adequate healthcare, organizers say. African Ambassadors is a nonprofit organization that gives secondary medical support to Tampa residents. The organization also provides free healthcare to those who have insufficient health insurance or none at all. Patients pay what they can afford, which oftentimes is nothing.
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota is dropping a service that provided consumers with telephone advice about ongoing health conditions, but will launch its own, more elaborate program in 2009. Healthways, a Tennessee-based medical outsourcing company, had been providing the service to Blue Cross under a 2001 contract. Blue Cross plans to now build its own internal organization to handle the telephone disease management services as well as new phone services aimed at people who are medically at risk.
An estimated 300 to 400 U.S. doctors kill themselves each year, which some doctors say is because the stigma of mental illness is magnified in a profession that prides itself on stoicism and bravado. And because doctors have easy access to prescription drugs and a precise knowledge of both how the body works and the amount of a drug needed for an overdose to stop breathing and halt the heart, it can be a dangerous combination. The American Medical Association has even called physician suicide "an endemic catastrophe."
The Georgia Department of Community Health has awarded a $5.2 million contract to the IBM Corp. to build a Web site for state consumers in an effort to help them make more informed healthcare decisions. The Web site, scheduled to go online in October, will offer information about hospitals and where various procedures are performed. The Web site will also permit the comparison of hospitals in terms of cost, quality, customer service scores, and other related information.
Cato T. Laurencin, MD, has been tapped by the University of Connecticut to head its troubled health center in Farmington, CT. Lurencin, an orthopedic surgeon is currently chairman of orthopedics at the University of Virginia, and will start Aug. 11 as the university's vice president for health affairs at the UConn Health Center and dean of the UConn medical school. The UConn Health Center now faces a $22 million deficit and is seeking help from the state to stay afloat while it negotiates a more permanent solution with nearby hospitals.
St. Francis Hospital & Health Center in Blue Island, IL, will become MetroSouth Medical Center after a "transfer of ownership" to a for-profit entity known as MSMC Investors and its affiliate, Transition Healthcare Co. The Catholic-owned, nonprofit St. Francis was threatened with closing after nearly 30 hospital operators and investment firms said they could not take on the hospital's myriad problems such as an increase in uninsured patients. A financial backer said the new deal calls for investing $30 million in new hospital equipment and facilities.