A year ago today, I was endlessly hitting refresh on HealthCare.Gov. It was the Affordable Care Act's second day of open enrollment and nothing ... was ... working. The web site was down. The phone lines were jammed. But it wasn't just HealthCare.Gov. The federal government itself had shut down the day before, after Republicans, led by Sen. Ted Cruz, failed to defund Obamacare. It wasn't yet clear what was wrong with HealthCare.Gov — if anything. It seemed possible that the site had simply buckled under overwhelming traffic, and the outages actually foretold a successful launch. That turned out to be both very wrong, and very right.
Proton beam radiation therapy has been touted as the next big thing in cancer care. The idea, enthusiasts say, is that doctors can deliver higher, more focused doses of radiation than they can in traditional therapy, with a lower risk of side effects. The massive machines, housed in facilities the size of football fields, have been sprouting up across the country for a decade. There are already 14 proton therapy centers in the U.S., and a dozen more facilities are under construction, even though each can cost $200 million to build. But Indiana University last month announced that it plans to close down its center in Bloomington, as reported by Modern Healthcare.
A fire in the Central New Jersey home of Cooper University Health System's chief executive officer and his wife was intentionally set, officials said Wednesday, but they did not disclose who set it or whether the fire caused the couple's deaths. The Somerset County Prosecutor's Office released a statement that investigators had determined that the Sunday blaze in John and Joyce Sheridan's second-floor master bedroom was not accidental. The statement did not indicate how the fire started or whether there was evidence of an intruder in the Colonial home in the Skillman section of Montgomery Township. The disclosure compounded the shock that legions of friends, neighbors, coworkers, and political figures who knew the Sheridans felt at learning of their deaths.
Massachusetts' Department of Public Health reported 753 cases of serious medical errors at hospitals last year. Patient safety advocates say the best way to reduce medical errors is for hospitals to openly acknowledge mistakes and learn from them. But the fear of malpractice lawsuits has gotten in the way of that. A couple years ago, Massachusetts passed a law that supports a more open apology process. Now, two hospital systems, Baystate Health and Beth Israel Deaconess, are taking that process one step further. Historically, if a patient was given the wrong medication, or had the wrong leg operated on, or suffered from some other medical misstep, most hospitals would kick into a mode known as 'deny and defend.'
Baptist Memorial Health Care has announced plans to lay off 112 workers as part of its efforts to reduce costs and expand services to patients. The Memphis-based hospital system operates 14 hospitals in three states, including Booneville, Columbus, New Albany and Oxford. In a news release, the hospital system says most of the cuts will come from its corporate services. Baptist administrators say they have also found significant savings by reducing supply expenses, eliminating non-essential items and improving processes. The healthcare provider includes more than 4,000 affiliated physicians, home, hospice and psychiatric care, minor medical centers and clinics, outpatient centers and an education system highlighted by the Baptist College of Health Sciences.
I don't know about late patients being the "bane" of anybody's existence, but they were sufficiently irritating that in 2013 doctors at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine produced a study that attempted to improve patient punctuality. The study tracked the appointment and arrival times of 1,500 adult patient visits in an outpatient clinic in Maryland and found that 7.7 percent, or one-thirteenth, of those patients arrived at least one minute late. Almost no one was right on time — a huge 90.7 percent of patients arrived before their appointments. And they weren't just getting to the clinic with seconds to spare; on average, early arrivers got there 24.1 minutes beforehand. That's a greater miss than the average latecomer, who got there 20.5 minutes after the designated time.