Retail health clinics found inside pharmacies and other stores should be used as backups to people's regular doctors, says a large group of U.S. physicians. The recommendation is one of six included in a position paper from the American College of Physicians (ACP) that aims to build a framework for retail health clinics underscoring patient safety, communication and collaboration. "We know that retail clinics are a reality," said ACP President Dr. Wayne J. Riley. "We embrace them as a backup alternative to primary care." Coughs and earaches are examples of the type of conditions people can take to retail health clinics when their regular doctors are not available, said Riley, who is also a professor at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee.
One of the top hospitals in the United States, the New York Presbyterian Hospital, has planned to close its family medicine center at the end of June 2016. Medical students, faculty and administrators at Columbia University Medical Center, which is affiliated with the hospital, described the decision as a surprise that lacked any kind of transparency. Closing the Center for Family Medicine would not only cut vital services for patients in the impoverished New York City community of Washington Heights, but it would also abruptly force residents there to reapply for new residency programs and faculty to teach or practice elsewhere.
During the presidential campaign, Americans will be bombarded with proposals to improve the U.S. health care system in ways big and small that would either build on or radically revamp the Affordable Care Act. All will claim to reduce costs and improve quality. In order to accomplish this, proposals will largely focus on what is termed "wasteful spending" in health care, spending not associated with improved quality that, by some estimates, accounts for over one-fourth of total health care spending. But, as Michael Porter and Robert Kaplan of Harvard Business School have argued, we need to examine costs at a more granular level at which clinical outcomes are matched with the business and administrative processes.
The board that certifies orthopedic specialists will use ProPublica's Surgeon Scorecard to help assess the competency of its surgeons, the organization's top administrator said today. The American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery will incorporate Scorecard's ratings into its recertification process, in which surgeons are formally re-evaluated every 10 years, Executive Director Dr. Shephard Hurwitz said. Surgeons may also be put on a watch list based on their Scorecard rating, he said. Action won't be taken based on a surgeon's performance in ProPublica's analysis alone, Hurwitz said.
If you pay attention to health care trends, Mitch Edgeworth's biggest priority for Vanderbilt University Hospital and clinics might not surprise you: He wants to improve access. Well, that's one of two priorities for Edgeworth, who moved into the CEO role at the hospital July 1. Internally, he's focused on empowering Vanderbilt's faculty and staff to do the same. But externally, Edgeworth is all about access, as is the system as a whole. Edgeworth takes over the system's adult services at a transformative time for Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Vanderbilt University are undergoing an unprecedented split, designed to make both function more efficiently.
As a child, Bishop Douglas Miles heard the warnings about vans trolling East Baltimore streets, snatching up young African-Americans for medical experiments at nearby Johns Hopkins Hospital. Whether there was any truth behind those stories—Hopkins has always denied them—hardly mattered. The mythology lived on and, combined with the hospital’s very real development decisions, contributed to a persistent view of Hopkins as an imperious, menacing presence amid the largely poor and African-American neighborhoods surrounding it. But now, Miles says, that perception could be changing. Johns Hopkins University and the Hopkins hospital and health system have launched an ambitious initiative to fill many more jobs with residents from distressed Baltimore neighborhoods and boost the use of minority contractors and vendors from those areas.