The chief executive of Natchez's two newly combined hospitals says Community Health Systems will buy out a group of 10 physicians who own part of Natchez Community Hospital as part of its consolidation with Natchez Regional Medical Center. CEO Eric Robinson told The Natchez Democrat that the Tennessee-based company, which bought Natchez Regional out of bankruptcy, will try to cut jobs through attrition. He told a group of business leaders Friday that it's too soon to tell what consolidation will ultimately look like, in part because the parent company hopes one stronger hospital will keep more patients in Natchez and recruit more physicians.
On Tuesday, CMS announced plans to reopen the submission period for hardship exemption applications for the meaningful use program, EHR Intelligence reports. Under the 2009 economic stimulus package, providers who demonstrate meaningful use of certified electronic health records can qualify for Medicaid and Medicare incentive payments. Last month, CMS announced that about 44,000 health care providers submitted hardship exemption applications for the meaningful use program before the July 1 deadline. The deadline for eligible hospitals was April 1. A CMS spokesperson noted that the majority of applications were submitted by first-time attesters who experienced difficulty with their 2014 certified EHR system.
A 2003 rule restricting the number of hours doctors-in-training can work each week didn't affect the quality of care they provided once they were practicing independently, suggests a new study. Restricting the hours doctors-in-training (commonly called "residents") worked each week may, in fact, have improved the outcomes for their high-risk patients, the researchers write in the journal Health Affairs. "I think there are two issues that are very hotly debated in the field of medical education and workforce training," said Dr. Anupam Jena, the study's lead author from Harvard Medical School in Boston.
I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn't one of them. Although I was given a dry, leathery corpse to dissect in my first term, that was solely a way to learn about human anatomy. Our textbooks had almost nothing on aging or frailty or dying. How the process unfolds, how people experience the end of their lives, and how it affects those around them seemed beside the point. The way we saw it, and the way our professors saw it, the purpose of medical schooling was to teach how to save lives, not to tend to their demise.
The app was designed to enable doctors to share pictures of their patients, both with each other and with medical students. So far, more than 150,000 doctors have uploaded case photos with the patient's identity obscured. However, some experts have expressed concern about patient confidentiality. Patients' faces are automatically obscured by the app but users must manually block identifying marks like tattoos. Each photo is reviewed by moderators before it is added to the database. Founder Dr Josh Landy told the BBC that the Figure 1 service did not access any patient records.
UPMC's global reach is about to extend to the Baltics. Lithuania Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevicius is expected in Pittsburgh today to sign a 15-year, multimillion-dollar deal with UPMC to co-manage a still-to-be-constructed 100-bed cancer hospital in the nation's capital scheduled to open in 2017. When finished, the Vilnius hospital will offer standard cancer care as well as higher-level care such as stereotactic radiosurgery that targets tumors with radiation beams.