Dr. Gerald Hickson had two primary concerns after his wife’s double-knee replacement operation at Vanderbilt University Hospital in July 2008: making sure she received appropriate pain control and getting her moving as quickly as possible to avoid blood clots. But as he sat with her during her recovery, Hickson made a disturbing discovery. Most of the nurses, doctors and other hospital workers filing in and out of the room to care for his wife, who was at risk of contracting an infection after surgery, were not washing their hands. A compulsive person by nature, Hickson started counting.
A small-town northern Iowa hospital hopes Des Moines-area residents seeking weight-loss surgery will drive 90 miles to undergo the procedure in its new operating rooms.The Iowa Specialty Hospital in Belmond is partnering with a Des Moines surgeon to provide the operations, which reduce the size of patients’ stomachs so they can’t eat as much. The new business, called “Iowa Weight Loss Specialists,” is led by Dr. Todd Eibes, who worked at Iowa Methodist Medical Center in Des Moines until earlier this year. The new arrangement represents a rare effort by a rural hospital to compete directly for business with big-city counterparts. Most Des Moines-area residents wanting bariatric surgery go to Iowa Methodist or to Mercy Medical Center.
At the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, doctors are just as likely to store iPads in their white coat pockets as stethoscopies. The center's clinicians use mobile devices -- tablets, smartphones, and occasionally wearable computers such as Google Glass -- to access electronic medical records, both at the patient's bedside or in the operating room. Sometimes they use the devices to show patients their X-rays or other images. Though it is among the first to bring Google Glass into the operating room, Beth Israel isn't alone in its pro-technology approach. A growing group of health centers are incorporating mobile devices into medicine, allowing providers to immediately access patient information from the Internet cloud, often during examination or treatment.
At the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, doctors are just as likely to store iPads in their white coat pockets as stethoscopies. The center's clinicians use mobile devices -- tablets, smartphones, and occasionally wearable computers such as Google Glass -- to access electronic medical records, both at the patient's bedside or in the operating room. Sometimes they use the devices to show patients their X-rays or other images. Though it is among the first to bring Google Glass into the operating room, Beth Israel isn't alone in its pro-technology approach. A growing group of health centers are incorporating mobile devices into medicine, allowing providers to immediately access patient information from the Internet cloud, often during examination or treatment.
University Hospitals and Aetna, the third largest U.S. health insurer, have launched an accountable care organization collaboration (ACO) designed to coordinate care and reduce costs for participants enrolled in the insurer's health plans. The ACO, which launched July 1, covers 22,000 Aetna members who currently receive care from UH physicians. It is UH's sixth ACO in the state and Aetna's fifth. ACOs are a cost-saving method of delivering care by a network of doctors and hospitals created by the Affordable Care Act. The main goal of an ACO is to reduce cost with better communication among all the doctors involved in a patient's care, by improving quality, outcomes and patient experience, and by advocating wellness and preventive care.
All hospitals in New Jersey — including the growing number of private, for-profit hospitals — would have to publicly disclose financial audits and internal business dealings, under a proposal made public Friday night by State Health Commissioner Mary O’Dowd. Gov. Chris Christie directed O’Dowd to study the issue of hospital transparency and accountability after he vetoed a bill in 2012 that would have placed broad disclosure requirements on for-profit, investor-run hospitals that are not legally required to publicly disclose this information.
Although the number of Alabamians with health insurance has increased, hospital officials said they are still treating the same number of uninsured patients as they were before the Affordable Care Act's implementation. "In Alabama, we're getting hit multiple times," said David Spillers, CEO of the Huntsville Hospital System, which manages Decatur Morgan General. "We're not expanding Medicaid, the number of uninsured is going up, and people insuring with high deductibles are going up." Spillers, who serves on the Alabama Hospital Association Board, said these problems are not limited to north Alabama -- it's throughout the state.