Dr. Douglas Wallace will soon leave his practice in Fresno, CA, more than nine months after he was linked to a number of patient infections at Saint Agnes Medical Center. According to officials, Saint Agnes did not call for Wallace's resignation, as patient infections have plagued the hospital over the past year.
The Pennsylvania Patient Authority has enlisted a liaison to help improve patient safety at hospitals throughout the state, beginning in the northeast region and expanding statewide next year. The agency, established in 2002, works to reduce medical errors at hospitals and outpatient centers, requiring that all errors be reported. Since its inception, the agency has received nearly one million such reports.
A Virginia hospital and public school system are experimenting with lowering employee costs for some chronic disease medications and providing free counseling for depression. The idea, called value-based insurance design, has been found to be effective in improving medication compliance.
Two Greater Cincinnati organizations, the Health Improvement Collaborative and HealthBridge, have joined a federal program geared toward making healthcare quality and price information widely available. The two organizations are part of 11 community collaborations to across the country to become "chartered value exchanges," a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services initiative. The communities will have access to information from Medicare that gauges the quality of care that physicians provide to patients.
A federal judge has scaled back an order overturning a 10% cut in Medi-Cal fees to thousands of doctors and other health professionals, sparing California from tens of millions of dollars of reimbursements over seven weeks and requiring repayment only for services performed on or after Aug. 18. The judge had ruled Aug. 18 that the fee reductions threatened healthcare for many of Medi-Cal's 6.6 million low-income patients and appeared to violate federal standards for access to high-quality medical services. She ordered state officials to reimburse healthcare providers dating back to July 1. But after lawyers for the Medi-Cal program argued that the Constitution shields states from retroactive damage awards, the judge revised her ruling to eliminate the back payments and require full fees at pre-July 1 levels only from Aug. 18 onward.
Sick Americans who travel far or frequently to get medical treatment are skipping or delaying appointments, leaving support groups, and applying for grants to defray high gasoline prices. People with chronic diseases who visit the doctor multiple times each week or month have been hardest hit. At the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, for example, some skin cancer patients are delaying appointments because they can't afford gasoline, said Center representatives.