Connecticut hospitals reported record numbers of errors in 2013, with large increases in the numbers of falls, medication mistakes and perforations during surgical procedures, a new state report shows. The report, covering 2013, marks the first time that the number of so-called "adverse events" in hospitals and other health care facilities has topped 500 — double the number in 2012, when 244 such incidents were reported. Much of the increase was due to an expansion of reporting on pressure ulcers, which added a new category with 233 "unstageable" ulcers that were not counted before. Even without that category, however, reports of adverse events climbed 20 percent from 2012.
The state attorney general's office will hold a series of public hearings this week on the controversial sale of six nonprofit hospitals, including Seton Medical Center in Daly City and O'Connor Hospital in San Jose, to a for-profit Southern California company. The proposed sale of the hospitals, operated by the cash-strapped Daughters of Charity Health System of Los Altos, to Prime Healthcare Services in Ontario (San Bernardino County) has pitted unions against each other and prompted several Bay Area lawmakers to criticize the deal.
The Affordable Care Act is on the move in Western states, with the governors of Utah, Wyoming and Montana all working on deals with the Obama administration to expand Medicaid in ways tailored to each state. But getting the federal stamp of approval is just the first hurdle. The governors also have to sell the change to their state legislators, who have their own ideas of how expansion should go. The latest example is Montana, where the governor and the legislature have competing proposals about how much federal Medicaid expansion cash the state should try to bring in.
In December, the Food and Drug Administration approved a new obesity drug, Saxenda, the fourth prescription medicine the agency has given the green light to fight obesity since 2012. But even though two-thirds of adults are overweight or obese, there's a good chance their insurer won't cover Saxenda or other anti-obesity drugs. The health benefits of using obesity drugs to lose weight — improvements in blood sugar and risk factors for heart disease, among other things — may not be immediately apparent. "For things that are preventive in the long term, it makes plan sponsors think about their strategy," says Dr. Steve Miller, the chief medical officer at Express Scripts, which manages the prescription drug benefits for thousands of companies.
Teach someone to fish, the saying goes, and they'll eat for a lifetime. Teach a nurse to become more involved in helping people heal, and patients could enjoy a longer life. That's the philosophy behind training nurses to mentor other nurses, says Sheila Davis, chief nursing officer and chief of Ebola response for Partners in Health, the worldwide nonprofit organization. PIH introduced nurse mentorship programs in Rwanda in 2010 and Haiti in 2012 — and plans to expand to Ebola-stricken Liberia and Sierra Leone. We spoke to Davis about how raising nurses' expertise has very real benefits for patients.
Dr. Eric Wong, a neurologist with an engineering background, had a hunch that an experimental scalp device to treat brain tumors using electromagnetic fields would work. But some other researchers scoffed at Wong, co-director of the tumor center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Doctors at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, for example, rejected Wong's request in 2010 to join a study of the device in patients with glioblastomas — the deadly type of brain cancer that killed Senator Edward M. Kennedy — because they doubted the electromagnetic fields could penetrate the skull. So Wong wound up referring patients to other facilities — Tufts Medical Center and Lahey Hospital — participating in a study of the device, called Optune, in newly diagnosed glioblastoma patients.