A plan among Wake County, NC hospitals to join a statewide treatment effort has sparked a turf war in Johnston County, where the project is seen as a way for large hospitals to siphon away lucrative heart patients.
Medtronic and other medical-device makers are attempting to obtain protection from multimillion-dollar product liability lawsuits in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. In the case, Riegel v. Medtronic, the court will decide on whether patients can file product-liability lawsuits over devices cleared for sale by the FDA's approval process.
YourCity.MD, a Web site targeted at physicians and consumers, has gone live in approximately 300 U.S. cities. Consumers can use the site to search for local physicians by name, specialty, hospital affiliation and travel distance. Physicians can sign up for a free listing and have access to patient feedback, peer reporting tools and patient information handouts.
A new report finds that the development of regional health information organizations may not be effective in advancing healthcare information technology. The report, titled "Improving Health Care: Why a Dose of IT May Be Just What the Doctor Ordered," calls for a renewed national strategy for advancing healthcare IT.
The new Electronic Medication Management System works like a personal computer, only for prescription medications. The system stores, organizes, and dispenses up to 10 different drugs, keeps track of complex dosing schedules, maintains printable records of a patient's medical history, and sets off alarms whenever it's time to take a pill.
The Bush administration has issued an eleventh-hour challenge to the physician lobby's efforts to prevent a pending 10 percent cut in their Medicare fees, in the form of call for a mandate that doctors use new information technology standards. The administration wants to tie any legislation blocking the cut, scheduled to take effect on Jan. 1, to physicians' adoptions of health IT in their offices.