Researchers and hospital executives walked away from a gathering at the White House with renewed vigor and morale after President Barack Obama announced a$215 million plan to grow cancer therapies and understanding in medicine tailored to a person's genetics. The funding, which still needs Congressional approval, would accelerate work ongoing in many of Boston's top hospitals and biotechnology firms, from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute's to Partners HealthCare's, to hundreds of Cambridge biotechs, breaking open once-siloed sources of information, and giving researchers the funding necessary to find new cures for cancer.
Operating room nurse John Kauchick says he's worked 17-hour shifts and once stayed on the job for 23 hours straight – risking fatigue that could lead to medical mistakes. Now the American Nurses Association seeks to reduce such risks with a new set of recommendations spelling out the dangers of nurse fatigue and ways employers can reduce it. The group is spreading the word to nurses and health care facilities across the USA. "With truck drivers and airline pilots, they'll pull the driver out of the truck or the pilot out of the plane" to avoid fatigue, says Kauchick, a traveling nurse who works mostly in Texas and New Mexico.
Each year, 100,000 people die from infections they picked up in the hospital. These are completely preventable diseases, caused by human error. But they result in as many annual deaths as AIDS, breast cancer and car accidents combined. They cost our health-care system $33 billion annually. As a physician and parent, I've seen the tragic consequences of this phenomenon firsthand. Five years ago, my young son required an emergency appendectomy. His surgery went well and his recovery was on track. Then, he was exposed to Clostridium difficile by his roommate. Instead of returning to school within the week, he was bedridden for nearly two months with unrelenting diarrhea, weight loss and fevers.
The Obama administration's goal of tying more Medicare payments to the quality—not the quantity—of health care by 2018 has intensified the debate over how "quality" is defined and measured. Many doctors, hospitals, insurers and cost experts want to move away from the myriad quality metrics that largely measure process—from tracking the percentage of patients with chest pain who get an aspirin in the ER, to how hair is removed from ambulatory surgery patients—toward broader measures that assess patient outcomes. On Friday, the National Quality Forum, a nonprofit advisory group, submitted recommendations on 199 performance measures for Health and Human Services to consider in 20 federal programs. [Subscription Required]
When Theresa Bixby, 63, learned that she had breast cancer four years ago, she reacted as many Americans do. "One of my first thoughts was, 'will they pay?' " she said. But she wasn't talking about a conventional insurance plan. She lost hers when she left her full-time position for part-time work at her church in Greenville, S.C. She was worried about the program that she had joined six months earlier: Christian Healthcare Ministries. Christian Healthcare Ministries is not an insurance company. It is a nonprofit "health care sharing ministry" based in Barberton, Ohio.
Buried in debt, Centinela hospital of Inglewood was on the verge of bankruptcy in 2007. It had lost $50 million in four years, and local officials worried that it might close — following the path of several other South Los Angeles hospitals. But where others saw risk, cardiologist Prem Reddy saw opportunity. Reddy's company, Prime Healthcare Services Inc., bought Centinela and quickly turned it around, cutting expenses and increasing revenue. Centinela lost $63 million in 2007. Six years later, it made $39 million. Today it's rated among the better-performing hospitals in the state.