Wareham, MA-based Tobey Hospital recently opened a $1 million ExpressCare unit, with a goal to get noncritical emergency patients in, treated, and discharged within an hour. The 70-bed hospital's emergency room usage has grown by 40% in the past 10 years, say hospital representatives. In 2007, Tobey had 28,000 emergency room visits, and this year is averaging 100 a day.
When most patients go to the pharmacy to fill a new prescription, they don't think twice about turning over the note from their doctor. But to the world's largest drug makers, the information is an invaluable sales tool that they use to track what drugs individual doctors are prescribing. Companies like IMS Health Inc., have built an industry around gathering prescription data and selling the information to pharmaceutical companies for millions of dollars each year. But now such companies are fighting laws in three New England states to keep prescribing information out of their hands.
In 2007, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released a broad comparison of death rates for heart attacks and heart failure, noting how hospitals compared with the national average without releasing the death rates themselves. But this year the agency decided to disclose them to consumers, and posted its new mortality estimates on the government website hospitalcompare.hhs.gov, along with more than two dozen other measures of how well hospitals meet patients' needs.
Nearly 75% of previously uninsured Massachusetts residents now have medical coverage under the state's campaign to extend health insurance to virtually everyone, according to a report. Since the program's launch in June 2006, 439,000 more people have enrolled in health insurance, and nearly half of them signed up for private insurance not funded by taxpayers. Before 2006, it was estimated that about 600,000 Massachusetts residents lacked health insurance. The expansion has spurred a substantial drop in patients seeking routine care in hospital emergency rooms, and the reduction is already saving the state millions of dollars, according to the report.
New York Gov. David A. Paterson has persuaded state lawmakers to cut spending by $1 billion over the next year and a half, a deal that includes cuts in aid to hospitals that will probably be in excess of $200 million over the next 18 months when federal matching funds are included. The issue of how to cut healthcare funding was one of the major sticking points that held up negotiations, lawmakers briefed on the talks said. Funding levels for hospitals proved particularly difficult to resolve because the Paterson's plan called for greater cuts than the healthcare industry and many lawmakers wanted.
Americans are struggling to pay medical bills and are accumulating medical debt at an increasing rate, according to a survey released by the Commonwealth Fund. The survey found two-thirds of the working-age population was uninsured, underinsured, reported a medical bill problem, or did not get needed healthcare because of cost in 2007. In addition, more than two in five adults in the 19-to-64 age group reported problems paying medical bills or had accumulated medical debt in 2007, up from one in three in 2005. Their difficulties included not being able to afford medical attention when needed, running up medical debts, or having to change their lifestyle to repay medical debts.