Carondelet Health, owner of St. Joseph Medical Center in Kansas City and St. Mary's Medical Center in Blue Springs, announced Monday it had signed a letter of intent to sell the hospitals to Prime Healthcare Services Inc. Carondelet, a part of Ascension Health, a Catholic health care system, had been trying to sell the two hospitals and some of its related facilities for at least two years. An attempt to become part of the HCA Health Midwest System was halted earlier this year when it appeared that federal regulators wouldn't approve the transaction because it would have made HCA too large a player in the Kansas City hospital industry.
Most parents intuitively know what a handoff is — the last time you had a babysitter come take care of your kids, or you dropped a child off at daycare, you probably performed a pretty sophisticated one yourself. You checked backpacks, lunchboxes, passed along instructions about sleep habits and illnesses, and left emergency numbers. Handoffs happen thousands of times a day at children's hospitals, when sick kids are admitted to the hospital, when they are transferred between nurses or doctors changing shifts, and when they are sent to receive diagnostic tests. Fumbling these handoffs — through miscommunication or misunderstanding — can cause serious harm.
Once again, Google has captured the news cycle with the announcement of an ambitious, health-focused project. But although Google's health portfolio continues to grow, its handful of health projects are still little more than pet projects to the search giant. As reported last week by The Wall Street Journal, the Google Baseline study will use a combination of genetic testing and digital health sensors to collect "baseline" data on healthy people. The idea is to establish genetic biomarkers relating to "how [patients] metabolize food, nutrients and drugs, how fast their hearts beat under stress and how chemical reactions change the behavior of their genes."
What if the path to curing cancer has been part of the body all along? For generations the three pillars of cancer treatment have been surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. But both chemotherapy and radiation are crude weapons with significant collateral damage to healthy tissue, and surgery can leave cancerous cells behind. Scientists have long tried to understand how to get the immune system—the body's natural defense mechanism—to recognize cancer cells as the enemy and destroy them. And now we may finally be turning the corner: Doctors are finding that clinical regimens known as immunotherapies can empower a patient's immune system to fight the disease like it might an infection, while sparing a person's normal cells.
After being without health insurance for two years, Miranda Childe of Hallandale Beach, Fla., found a plan she could afford with financial aid from the government using the Affordable Care Act's exchange. Childe, 60, bought an HMO plan from Humana, one of the nation's largest health insurance companies, and received a membership card in time for her coverage to kick in on May 1. But instead of being able to pick a primary care physician to coordinate her health care, Childe says she repeatedly ran into closed doors from South Florida doctors who are listed in her plan's provider network but refused to see patients who bought their coverage on the ACA exchange.
After more than six weeks of sometimes testy talks, House and Senate negotiators have agreed on a compromise plan to fix a veterans health program scandalized by long patient wait times and falsified records covering up delays.The chairmen of the House and Senate Veterans Affairs committees have scheduled a news conference Monday afternoon to unveil a plan expected to authorize billions in emergency spending to lease 27 new clinics, hire more doctors and nurses and make it easier for veterans who can't get prompt appointments with VA doctors to obtain outside care.