When Robin Blakeney of Concord stopped taking some of her medications to save money, she ended up hospitalized for two weeks. Blakeney, who has congestive heart failure, diabetes and high blood pressure, is the kind of fragile patient who accounts for an outsized share of America's soaring health care tab. The federal government has invested $15 million in a North Carolina experiment that gives community pharmacists a new role in patient care. The pharmacy project is part of a 10-year, $10 billion federal exploration to overhaul the nation's health care system. The Affordable Care Act created the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation to launch experiments in every state.
Wendy Salo was alarmed when she learned where her doctor had scheduled her gynecologic operation: at an outpatient surgery center. "My first thought was 'Am I not important enough to go to a real hospital?' " recalled Salo, 48, a supermarket department manager who said she felt "very trepidatious" about having her ovaries removed outside a hospital. Before the Sept. 30 procedure, Salo drove 20 miles from her home in Germantown, Md., to the Massachusetts Avenue Surgery Center in Bethesda for a tour. Her fears were allayed, she said, by the facility's cleanliness and its empathic staff. Salo later joked that the main difference between the multi-specialty center and Shady Grove Adventist Hospital — where she underwent breast cancer surgery last year — was that the former had "better parking."
The clinic where Joan Rivers suffered a fatal complication during a medical procedure has submitted an acceptable plan to correct problems uncovered during an investigation after her death, a federal health agency said Tuesday. The investigation, ordered by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, found the Yorkville Endoscopy clinic made several errors, including failing to keep proper medication records and snapping cellphone photos of Rivers while she was unconscious. It also found the Manhattan clinic failed to get informed consent for every procedure performed and failed to record Rivers' weight before the administration of sedation medication.
What's it take to see a doctor in December? The week after Thanksgiving, I came down with flulike symptoms and called my doctor's clinic at 8 a.m. The answering service said to call back in 10 minutes, when the staff would be settled in. At 8:09, I was told every appointment was taken until noon the next day. I went to an urgent care center, as advised, but it had no flu tests and the X-ray machine was down. The next urgent center had a three-hour wait, and the receptionist said to go home and wait for them to text me.
The following is a list of 10 essential medical apps that Family Medicine providers should have on their smartphones. Links to iPhone and Android platforms are provided for each app. The apps are listed based on my experiences working as a full scope Family Medicine physician and the app reviews that have been done prior at iMedicalApps.
In an article for the British Medical Journal's new Christmas issue, which classically accepts pieces on all kinds of lighthearted topics, three surgeons from the University Hospital of Wales review the existing literature on music in the OR. "Research guides everything we do?how we wash our hands, how we open and close the skin," says lead study author Dr. David Bosanquet, a surgical registrar at the University Hospital of Wales. "But I wanted to know if there was any evidence behind the music we play in [the operating] theater, and there is, actually."