It's getting so you can't even give birth in a hospital in some sections of Minnesota anymore. The Duluth News Tribune reports the Cook County North Shore Hospital in Grand Marais will close its obstetrics unit, joining Ely-Bloomenson Community Hospital in announcing the closing of birthing facilities. According to one survey, the number of hospitals offering obstetrics facilities is down 23 percent, most of them in rural areas. It's not that women aren't having babies, it's that hospitals can't get insurance because of rules from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, specifically one requiring that emergency cesarean section must be available within 30 minutes.
The Argonaut Project has a big, maybe even audacious ambition: to make health data-sharing easier by using Internet-based open messaging and documents standards instead of complex, healthcare-specific ones. The project's champion, John Halamka, is one of the best-known figures in health information technology. He's the CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a full professor at Harvard Medical School, the chairman of the New England Health Electronic Data Interchange Network (NEHEN), co-chair of the HIT Standards Committee, and a practicing emergency physician. Under his leadership, in 2012 Beth Israel Deaconess was the No. 1 company in InformationWeek's innovation ranking. His Life as a Healthcare CIO blog is a "must read" for any serious follower of the health IT landscape.
Employment in a key sector of western Pennsylvania's economy has stalled as reimbursement for medical care has fallen and fewer people were admitted to the hospital for treatment. The number of full-time-equivalent health system employees for the three months ending Sept. 30 decreased 2.5 percent or 1,735 people when compared to the same period a year ago, according to a new report by Hospital Council of Western Pennsylvania, a Warrendale-based trade group. During the same period, salary costs decreased $7 million while fringe benefit costs were down $3 million. The decline comes as health system reimbursement is under stress by Medicare and other payors.
The open records movement is moving beyond transparent, to interactive. That is, what if you could not just see your doctor's medical notes but actually comment on them and contribute to them? As you do, say, when you collaborate online with colleagues on a project in Google Docs? That's the next step, says Jan Walker, co-director of the "OpenNotes" project and a researcher at Beth Israel Deaconess and Harvard Medical School. With a new $450,000 grant from The Commonwealth Fund, researchers plan to develop and test "OurNotes," an interface that will invite patients to contribute to their own medical notes.
Step inside the new children's hospital in San Francisco and it might feel more like you are at the Exploratorium. That is exactly what officials at the UC San Francisco Benioff Children's Hospital San Francisco want patients to experience with its light-shadow installation and rotating art exhibits in the lobby. The facility is The City's first stand-alone children's hospital, and it is one of three new UCSF hospitals that will open Sunday as part of a $1.5 billion medical center at Mission Bay. "In a children's hospital, you put in a lot of things for fun, but that's part of the health care treatment," said Kim Scurr, executive director of UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital San Francisco.
Sen. Charles Grassley is calling out nonprofit hospitals who are suing poor patients over unpaid bills and says they could be breaking the law, according to a report by ProPublica and NPR. Grassley, R-Iowa, sent a letter, dated January 16, 2015, to Heartland Regional Medical Center, a nonprofit hospital in St. Joseph, Mo., that has garnished the wages of low-income patients who were unable to pay their medical bills. Citing the ProPublica and NPR report, Grassley said the hospital, which recently changed its name to Mosaic Life Care, had stretched the law to the breaking point. Grassley wrote that the hospital, "may not be meeting the requirements to be a nonprofit, tax-exempt hospital."