A New York hospital says it has performed the first fully robotic double lung transplant. The procedure is aimed at speeding up the healing process and shortening hospital stays. It builds on other minimally invasive procedures; back in 2022, Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles completed a partially robotic single lung transfer. And here at the NYU Langone Health Center on the East Side of Manhattan, doctors announced in September that they had performed the first fully robotic single lung transplant. The double lung procedure was conducted on 57-year-old resident of upstate New York, Cheryl Mehrkar, on Oct. 22.
Adding to the steady drumbeat of healthcare labor organizing in New England, about 160 clinicians at Cambridge Health Alliance on Thursday informed the state that they were forming a union to push back against what they say have become unsustainable, burnout-inducing working conditions. The bargaining unit includes physicians, psychologists, and physician associates in a range of fields at the safety-net health system.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his advisers are considering an overhaul of Medicare's decades-old payment formula, a bid to shift the health system's incentives toward primary care and prevention, say four people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations. The discussions are in their early stages, the people say, and have involved a plan to review the thousands of billing codes that determine how much physicians get paid for performing procedures and services.
In a major move to improve maternal health, the National Association of Nurse Practitioners in Women’s Health (NPWH) announced a landmark grant from the CDC Foundation that will empower the organizations to strengthen nursing’s response to infectious diseases during pregnancy with a keen focus on addressing the alarming resurgence of congenital syphilis in the United States.
Ohio lawmakers are debating a bill to address challenges facing nurses. One solution on the table is mandating minimum staffing ratios in all hospital units.
The Ohio nurses association surveyed 11,000 nurses last year and found 58% of them left bedside roles because of their patient care load, and 70% of direct care nurses said they’re considering leaving bedside roles because of how many patients they’re caring for.
A bill in the Ohio House, introduced by northwest Ohio lawmakers, would create minimum staffing standards for Ohio hospitals. They’d have up to two years to implement these ratios.
Electronic health records are increasingly including technology-aided predictions of how patients may respond to specific medications, known as pharmacogenomic alerts. Two Mayo Clinic Ph.D. candidates are exploring how artificial intelligence can be used to make these alerts more actionable and less intrusive for clinicians, who can suffer from alert overload.