The Kern County Board of Supervisors met Monday to discuss the future of the county's financially troubled Kern Medical Center. The Board met with hospital CEO Russell Judd and an outside consultant to outline new governance guidelines for KMC which is losing around $3 million a month. According to county administrative officer John Nilon, a new budget presented by the hospital's management would require the elimination of 111 positions in other county departments. That would be on top of the five percent cuts other county departments are already facing, which translates to about 107 positions.
Two Florida hospital employees who came into contact with the second confirmed case of the deadly respiratory virus known as MERS in the United States have developed flulike symptoms and are being tested for the viral infection, hospital and state health department officials said Tuesday. One employee of Dr. P. Phillips Hospital in Orlando was admitted Monday. The other employee is home. Those employees are among the 20 hospital personnel, family members and dozens of others being monitored for potential exposure. Hospital officials said they hope to receive test results in the next day or two.
Nearly a year after the operator of St. James hospitals in Olympia Fields and Chicago Heights put them on the market, Franciscan Alliance says the hospitals are no longer for sale after a turnaround effort it described as a near-miracle. Physicians, nurses and other staff learned of the decision by Mishawaka, Ind.-based Franciscan Alliance in a memo dated Monday. In June, Franciscan said it was looking for a potential buyer, such as a larger hospital network in Illinois, to acquire the St. James hospitals. The decision had been made due, in part, to mounting financial losses suffered by the hospitals, Franciscan said at the time.
Telling a packed Brooklyn courtroom that "a serious decision has to be made," state Supreme Court Justice Johnny Lee Baynes ruled against Brooklyn Health Partners' attempt to force the State University of New York (SUNY) to accept their bid for Long Island College Hospital (LICH). Brooklyn Health Partners (BHP), a team combining California developers and a Borough Park investor, had been ranked first in SUNY's disputed Request for Proposals bidding process, but contract talks fell apart weeks ago. BHP CEO Merrell Schexnydre and investor Harry (Chaim) Miller claimed SUNY did not negotiate in good faith. But they failed to make their case before Justice Baynes on Tuesday.
Developer of a Google Glass app for doctors, Remedy, launched a pilot study with three Harvard hospitals in which they will provide physicians assistants who are handling night coverage in hospitals — a time when doctors are not around as often as during the day — with Google Glass so that they can send their point of view videos to supervising doctors. From this pilot, Remedy will measure how much the Google Glass system changes the status quo for how healtcare providers manage the workflow of cases. The company also wants to measure patient perception and adoption rates on the surgeon side and the physician's assistant side.
Medical overtreatment is the inverse of former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's definition of pornography: While waste is easy to define in principle, it can be hard to know it when you see it. A treatment that is appropriate for one patient can also be unnecessary or even counterproductive for another, depending on the patient's condition. This has been a major obstacle for studies seeking to pinpoint overused services, which by the most expansive estimates may account for as much as a third of the nation's health spending. Using a novel method, a study released Monday by researchers from the Harvard Medical School Department of Health Care Policy evaluated the prevalence in Medicare of 26 tests and procedures that have been found to offer little or no clinical benefit