In its toughest crackdown yet on medical errors, the federal government is cutting payments to 721 hospitals for having high rates of infections and other patient injuries, records released Thursday show. Medicare assessed these new penalties against some of the most renowned hospitals in the nation, including the Cleveland Clinic, Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pa. One out of every seven hospitals in the nation will have their Medicare payments lowered by 1 percent over the fiscal year that began Oct. 1 and continues through September 2015.
This was the year of the biggest Ebola outbreak of all time. It started in Guinea at the tail end of 2013, and the World Health Organization was made aware of it in March 2014, by which time Guinea had 86 cases, and there were suspected cases in neighboring Liberia and Sierra Leone. The virus spread steadily, claiming more and more lives until the WHO declared the outbreak a "public-health emergency of international concern" on August 8. People in affected communities were understandably fearful; some were distrustful of health workers and resisted going to treatment centers, where it may have seemed they were only going to die.
Credit ratings agencies are forecasting trouble for the U.S. hospital sector in 2015 as federal reimbursements decrease and Republicans float a variety of changes to ObamaCare. Standard & Poor's Ratings, Moody's Investors Services and Fitch Ratings all predicted that the healthcare world will face challenges in the form of rising costs and uncertainty surrounding the healthcare law. A Supreme Court ruling against tax credits in the federally run health insurance exchanges, for example, could create problems in states that did not expand Medicaid.
A statewide investigation by The News Leader discovered Zientek among 900 nurses publicly disciplined by the licensing board from 2007 to mid-2013 for drug theft and use at work. Key findings emerge from a yearlong examination of thousands of pages of public records, dozens of interviews with nurses and experts and days spent observing administrative hearings: •Across Virginia, scores of patients in pain during the last decade were denied necessary medication because a nurse was stealing it. •Employers struggle to catch nurses with drug problems, and when they find them don't always report the nurses to the state.
Storefronts for ObamaCare coverage are panning out well this year as a way to bring in customers to the exchanges, state officials from around the country said Wednesday. California and Kentucky exchange directors said they're relying on storefronts more heavily this year to connect shoppers with individual help navigating the marketplaces. California has more than 300 agent and community storefronts assisting with enrollment, said Covered California Chief Deputy Executive Director Yolanda Richardson. While Kentucky has just one location, Kentucky Health Benefit Exchange Director Carrie Banahan said the storefront has received nearly 5,000 visitors.
The worst Ebola outbreak on record, and its spread beyond West Africa, has accelerated changes in how U.S. hospitals address the threat of infectious diseases, say health IT companies and industry experts. After more than five years and a $25 billion investment of federal money to move U.S. medical records out of paper files and into computers, doctors say the systems lack analytical functions, don't allow them to share information with colleagues in other practices and require too much time to enter data. They say the limitations are affecting patient care and that fixing the system will take years.