For hospitals, patient satisfaction ratings don't necessarily line up with cancer surgery stats, according to a new study. "I don't think the results are necessarily surprising, they just highlight that there is very little publicly reported hospital data to help guide cancer patients in decision making," said lead author Dr. Jason D. Wright of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. It's difficult to say if the results would be similar with a different group of patients who were not undergoing surgery for cancer, he said.
State lawmakers in California introduced legislation Wednesday that would require children to be fully vaccinated before going to school, a response to a measles outbreak that started in Southern California and has reached 107 cases in 14 states. California is one of 19 states that allows parents to enroll their children in school unvaccinated through a "personal belief exemption" to public health laws. The outbreak of measles that began in December in Anaheim's Disneyland amusement park has spread more quickly in communities where many parents claim the exemption. State Sens. Dr. Richard Pan and Ben Allen have proposed eliminating the personal belief exemption altogether in California.
The incoming CEO at Partners HealthCare says the network will continue to expand, but not necessarily in Massachusetts. Dr. David Torchiana said a judge's rejection of Partners' plan to acquire three more hospitals in the state was clear. "We're obviously chastened by the verdict," Torchiana said. "There wasn't any ambiguity to the message that we got back." Suffolk Superior Court Judge Janet Sanders ruled last month that allowing the state's largest hospital network to expand "would cement Partners' already strong position in the health care market and give it the ability, because of this market muscle, to exact higher prices."
Three seniors in the nursing program at the SUNY College at Brockport follow professor Jennifer Chesebro through a long nondescript room with eight occupied hospital beds along the walls. Chesebro addresses each patient by name, and handles them with the tender touch that she's developed in 21 years of nursing. Each patient has their own unique ailments for the students to practice treating, but they stare up with hard fixed plastic eyes. The patients in this room don't respond to their caregivers — they're mannequins. Here, and in another demonstration lab across the hall, students practice drawing blood, inserting IVs, and moving patients.
A "secret shopper" exercise by hospital CEOs and CFOs in part inspired upcoming efforts by the Ohio Hospital Association to explain pricing and help patients compare facilities on cost and quality. The 18 trustees, top executives at hospitals ranging from small rural facilities to the Cleveland Clinic, posed as uninsured patients calling their own institutions and asked a scripted set of questions about what it would cost to get a procedure. "There were a lot of people surprised at how difficult it was to get pricing information," said Mike Abrams, CEO of the trade group for 219 hospitals and 13 systems.
While Medicaid is the primary way to cover the poor, charity care used to be a far simpler proposition for doctors, said David S. Jones, the A. Bernard Ackerman professor of the culture of medicine at Harvard University. In the era before modern surgery and antibiotics, care for all but the very elite was provided by unschooled healers such as midwives, "bone-setters," and apothecaries. Their fees were low, and many would barter their services for crops or food. "The families would give what they could. Sometimes it was a chicken, sometimes it was a roll of cloth. Sometimes they would show up months later, when their fortunes had changed, and say, 'Here's a turkey. Thanks for taking care of us,' " Jones said.