The Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board postponed its decision on the proposed merger of Kenneth Hall Regional Hospital and Touchette Regional Hospital. The board said it needed to further analyze financial information submitted by the Southern Illinois Healthcare Foundation, which owns both of the hospitals. Some administrative functions of the two hospitals, including accounting, finance and payroll, have already been integrated.
The decision by Christopher T. Olivia, MD, to take the chief executive position at West Penn Allegheny Health System of Pittsburgh has delivered a setback to Boston's Caritas Christi Health Care System. Olivia was the top candidate to take over the troubled six-hospital Caritas Christi. In a statement, James J. Karam, chairman of Caritas Christi's board of governors, said the chain would select a chief executive "in the coming weeks."
In a recently released study, researchers found that depending on the organ needed, residents of rural areas were 10 to 20 percent less likely to get a transplant. The study reviewed approximately 175,000 patients who were on waiting lists for heart, kidney or liver transplants from 1999 to 2004.
Regulatory guidelines recently issued by the Department of Labor may curtail the ability of employers to motivate workers to kick unhealthy habits. The guidelines close a legal loophole that could have allowed employers to make health insurance more expensive for unhealthy workers than for their colleagues.
Most doctors agree that medical errors should be reported to their hospitals, but a significant number admit they don't always report their own, according to a study by researchers frm the University of Iowa. Seventeen percent of doctors surveyed admitted hat they had failed to report minor errors, defined as mistakes that "prolonged treatment or caused discomfort." Four percent admitted they had failed to report mistakes that "caused disability or death," the survey found.
Alabama's nurse practitioner rules limit their ability to write prescriptions and require them to be paired with a collaborating physician. But a proposed bill drafted by the Nurse Practitioners Alliance of Alabama would relax the rules and make it easier for trained nurse practitioners to work in poor, rural counties where medical care is scarce.