Many hospitals and doctor practices are offering patients the convenience of signing up for appointments and even reservations to be seen in the emergency room, right from their smartphone or laptop. This brings them new patients and retains existing ones wanting to avoid hassles and long waits. At the same time, it helps doctors fill slots from last-minute appointment cancellations and hospital ERs shift patients with non-life-threatening conditions to slower times of the day. Companies providing the online signups, and doctors and hospitals using the services, say most patients are seen within 15 to 20 minutes of their ER reservation or doctor appointment.
Boston hospitals decreased their energy use by 4 percent and emissions by 2.9 percent from 2011 to 2013, according to a new report. The December report, prepared by Health Care Without Harm and with participation of the Health Care Working Group of the Boston, is part of a decades-long, citywide initiative to decrease energy use throughout Boston. While 22 hospitals participate in the program, the recent report included data from only 13 institutions. A total of 39 buildings totaling 22 million square feet of space was included.
Last month, ProPublica and NPR detailed how one nonprofit hospital in Missouri sued thousands of lower income workers who couldn't pay their bills, then seized their wages, all while enjoying a big break on its taxes. Since then, the IRS has released long-awaited rules designed to address such aggressive debt collection against the poor. Largely because these new rules fill a void — there were hardly any rules at all — patient advocates agree they are a major step forward. Even so, they have easily exploitable gaps. It remains up to each hospital, for example, to decide which patients the new rules should apply to. And because the rules only apply to hospitals that have been granted tax-exempt status by the IRS, they don't apply to for-profit hospitals or most public hospitals.
When I was just beginning my third year as a medical student, I learned an important lesson about what matters most in health. It was a typical summer afternoon in St. Louis, with the temperature and humidity both approaching 100. My patient was a woman in her 40s who was being admitted to the hospital because her lungs were filling with fluid, a complication of kidney failure. She had missed all three dialysis appointments that week. She told me that her son had been arrested, and he was the one who drove her back and forth from the dialysis clinic. She couldn't pay her bills, and her electricity had been shut off.
Medical journals are fairly dry reading, and it isn't often that I come across an intriguing headline like "Green Eggs and Ham." But there it was in a recent issue of Academic Medicine, with a story noting how Dartmouth's medical school had been renamed in 2012 for one of the university's most famous graduates, Theodor Geisel, or Dr. Seuss — a doctor, of course, of a different kind. Dartmouth Medical School had been rechristened the Audrey and Theodor Geisel School of Medicine, joining a growing list of medical schools that had been renamed after benefactors.
Patients with advanced colorectal cancer underwent surgery less often than they did 20 years ago, while relative survival rates grew during that period, according to a study using 2010 data.