The state's largest health system acquired a group of about 70 doctors Wednesday, adding 60,000 patients to its network, despite warnings from the attorney general and health officials that the deal would raise medical costs without benefiting consumers. But Partners HealthCare promised to limit price increases for its new doctors, who make up the practice Harbor Medical Associates, to the rate of inflation for about five years. Partners operates 10 hospitals, including the prestigious Boston teaching hospitals, Massachusetts General, and Brigham and Women's. Partners spokesman Rich Copp said the health system alerted the state's largest health insurers — Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, and Tufts Health Plan — about its plans on Wednesday.
The chance of surviving any of four high-risk surgeries can vary by as much as 23 percent depending on what hospital patients use, according to an analysis released on Thursday. The report - by the nonprofit Leapfrog Group, a patient-safety organization supported by large employers, and Castlight Health Inc, which sells software for employers to manage healthcare spending - shows that choice of hospital "can mean the difference between life and death," said Leapfrog's Erica Mobley. Rating hospitals has become somewhat of a free-for-all, with competing groups using different data and definitions of quality.
Online reviews are every business's nightmare and every consumer's obsession. We rely on them as we scour restaurants on Yelp, search for power tools on Amazon, choose movies on Netflix, and shop for artisanal jewelry on Etsy. But when it comes to prescription medication, too often, we take what our doctors give us, no questions asked. That's a major problem, considering nearly 70 percent of Americans take prescription drugs, according to the Mayo Clinic. And it's especially troubling because, as comedian John Oliver brilliantly conveyed in a recent episode of Last Week Tonight, in far too many cases, the doctors prescribing those drugs are on the payrolls of the very companies that sell them.
Minnesota's hospitals and nurses have come down on different sides of a bill aimed at protecting health care workers from attacks. Sen. Chuck Wiger drafted his Violence Against Health Workers bill in response to a November attack at St. John's hospital in Maplewood, part of Wiger's district. In that case a 68-year-old patient with no prior history of violence suddenly assaulted four of his caregivers with a steel rod he pulled off of a piece of equipment. A chilling surveillance video clip showed the man chasing nurses and others around the ward, striking them with the rod.
On the evening of April 19, 2013, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was rushed by ambulance to Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center after a gun battle with the FBI. Dr. Stephen Odom was the attending trauma surgeon on call. Boston and its surrounding towns had been on lockdown all day as police hunted Tsarnaev, and it was a tense time throughout the city — not least of all at the hospital, where several marathon bombing victims were recuperating from surgeries and amputations. Tsarnaev arrived with multiple gunshot wounds, "the most severe of which appears to have entered through the left side inside of his mouth and exited the left…lower face," Odom told a judge in a hospital bedside court hearing on April 22.
Blue Cross Blue Shield's decision last week to vastly expand its Alternative Quality Contract — which rewards doctors for how well they care for patients, not just how many procedures they perform — is good news for an industry plagued by rapidly increasing costs. Experts have long contended that global payment systems such as the Alternative Quality Contract are the best way for health insurers to cut costs and deliver higher quality care. Blue Cross Blue Shield's experiment will show whether that theory works on a large scale. If it does, other insurance companies should follow. Traditionally, health insurers have paid doctors a set amount for each procedure they perform.