Never has more change come more rapidly to the health care industry. In North Texas, not-for-profit providers are collaborating with retailers on walk-in clinics at neighborhood drugstores and aligning with elite national providers. This week, Dallas-based Methodist Health System said it was becoming part of the Mayo Clinic's nationwide Care Network. Similarly, Baylor Scott & White Health is working on an agreement to become part of the Cleveland Clinic's national cardiology network. Meanwhile, Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare Corp., one of the nation's largest for-profit hospital companies, is busy collaborating across the country. In El Paso, it is partnering with Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center to build a new hospital.
Doctors in many U.S. hospitals are unnecessarily prescribing multiple antibiotics for several days when just one would do the job, a new study released Wednesday suggests. Health officials have sounded alarms that overuse of antibiotics is helping to breed dangerous bacteria that are increasingly resistant to treatment. Much of the attention has been on doctor offices that wrongly prescribe bacteria-targeting antibiotics for illnesses caused by viruses. The new study focuses on a different issue — when hospital doctors throw more than one antibiotic at a mystery infection. Faced with a feverish and deteriorating patient entering the hospital, doctors will at first prescribe a couple of antibiotics.
An estimated 52 of the 400 employees of Crittenden Regional Hospital had their jobs saved by a local doctor. Scott Ferguson, a West Memphis-based radiologist, and Rick Williams, who owns hospice care facilities around Arkansas, have acquired Crittenden Regional's Home Health and Hospice Care facility. After years of financial troubles, the hospital was to be the beneficiary of a sales tax increase designed to make up for short falls. But a summer fire forced the facility to close, resulting in repairs that prevented it from reopening. The hospital officially closed in late August. Ferguson, who was previously a Democratic state legislator in Arkansas, said the acquisition will allow between 200 and 300 home health patients to keep the same staff members they've used for years.
St. Francis Medical Center, one of Ouachita Parish's largest private employers, plans to cut about 300 jobs before the end of the year. In a statement from the hospital on Tuesday, St. Francis said it would offer about 300 employees a voluntary workforce adjustment compensation package that would voluntarily end their employment before the end of the year. The News-Star reports the hospital also is considering a consolidation that would close its downtown campus and consolidate its operations into the St. Francis North hospital on U.S. 165 North. That decision is expected to be made this fall.
Health care spending has, for decades, followed a consistent pattern. America pays more and more for health care — and gets less and less. Between 1990 and 2012, the insured rate in the United States fell two percentage points, from 86.6 to 84.6 percent. If the insured rate had just held steady, six million more people would have been covered in 2012. While we were covering less people, we kept spending more on health care. National health spending, over that time period, rose from 12 percent of the economy in 1990 to 17.2 percent in 2012. Adjusted for inflation, health-care spending rose from $1.1 trillion to $2.8 trillion over those 22 years.
Small interactions like these make hospitals safer for children by reducing rates of hospital-acquired infections. Now a new article shows exactly how much safer. Children are getting far fewer infections in American hospitals, according to a very large study released this week in the journal Pediatrics. From 2007 to 2012, using data collected in 173 U.S. hospitals and over five million days of hospitalization, investigators tracked rates of multiple hospital infections, including bloodstream infections among children with intravenous lines and pneumonias in children on mechanical ventilators. The results were impressive. They found that children developed bloodstream infections from intravenous lines less than a third as often as they did five years earlier.