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.
Theresa Yang, MD, was drawn to practicing in the intensive care unit (ICU) since before she began her internal medicine residency at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.
Heads of the FDA and National Institutes of Health told a Senate panel that the public would be best served if Congress would simply give their agencies the support they need to do their jobs, with less heckling from the sidelines.
The vast majority of clinical trials fail to have their results posted to the main federal registry, Clinicaltrials.gov, within a year of completion as required by law, researchers found.