Dr. Paul Abramson is no technophobe. He works at a hydraulic standing desk made in Denmark and his stethoscope boasts a data screen. "I'm an engineer and I'm in health care," he says. "I like gadgets." Still, the proliferation of gadgets that collect health data are giving him pause. Abramson is a primary care doctor in San Francisco and lots of his patients work in the tech industry. So it's not surprising that more and more of them are coming in with information collected from consumer medical devices — you know, those wristbands and phone apps that measure how much exercise you're getting or how many calories you're eating.
Just like Doogie Howser, this teen doctor wasn't real either. A 17-year-old boy dressed in a white lab coat, face mask and stethoscope around his neck told West Palm Beach police he was a doctor at St. Mary's Medical Center and had been practicing for years, according to a police report obtained by The Smoking Gun. But Dr. Sebastian Kent and several nurses immediately contacted police Tuesday after seeing the young man — who isn't much older than the fictional TV character Doogie Howser — when he entered their OB/GYN office.
When R. Phillip Dellinger, MD, looked back over the distinguished career that earned him a lifetime achievement award in critical care, he urged the field forward in 10 directions. The biggest advance needed now is in compassion, he said in a plenary talk at the Society of Critical Care Medicine meeting.
The Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled that a medical staff has standing to sue its hospital board and that the medical staff bylaws constitute "an enforceable contract between members of a medical staff and a hospital."
The nation's health care systems are in transition. And while hospitals across the country are grappling with changes to payment systems and quality measures, the tiniest hospitals in rural areas must work even harder to keep up. In Iowa, the rural health care system is made up of 82 Critical Access Hospitals — a special Medicare designation for smaller 25-bed facilities — and 142 rural health clinics, making it one of the largest rural health systems in the country, said Gloria Vermie, director of the State Office of Rural Health Director, which is part of the Iowa Department of Public Health.
Nassau University Medical Center and Stony Brook University Hospital expect to hear news within the next few months that could mean hundreds of millions of dollars for Long Island and fundamentally change how they and scores of other local health care organizations do business. Both have been designated lead organizations on Long Island in the state's Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment, or DSRIP, program. Part of the state's attempt to overhaul the health care system to improve care for low-income patients, DSRIP will allocate $6.42 billion to safety net or public hospitals and their community collaborators statewide over the next five years.