Work has begun on a new main entrance at Advocate Good Shepherd Hospital, adding more traffic cones, construction cranes and workers in hard hats to the campus near Lake Barrington, but also signaling further progress in the facility's $247 million modernization project expected to finish in 2017. Officials say the new entrance will provide a much-needed facelift to the 35-year-old hospital. "The lobby portion of the project really creates an updated look for the facility," said Alison Wyler, the executive sponsor of the campus modernization project. "Our building is old and we wanted to create a much better environment for our patients."
At his yearly CEO summit, noted VC Vinod Khosla spoke with Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page (file under "King, Good To Be The"). Towards the end of a wide-ranging conversation that encompassed driverless cars, flying wind turbines, and high-altitude balloons providing internet access, Khosla began to ask about health. Specifically, Khosla wondered whether they could "imagine Google becoming a health company? Maybe a larger business than the search business or the media business?" Their response, surprisingly, was basically, "no." While glucose-sensing contact lenses might be "very cool," in the words of Larry Page.
U.S. health care providers wrote 259 million prescriptions for opioid painkillers in 2012, enough to give a bottle of the pills to every adult in the country. But your chances of ending up with those pills – and the risks that come with them – depend a lot on where you live, says a new report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The report, published Tuesday, shows prescribing rates vary widely by state for drugs best known by brand names such as Vicodin, Percocet and OxyContin. The highest rates are in the Southeast, led by Alabama. Providers in that state wrote 143 prescriptions for every 100 residents, while providers in Hawaii, the state with the lowest rate, wrote 52 for every 100 people, nearly three times fewer.
The government is expanding its "mystery disease" program, funding a network at six universities around the country to help diagnose patients with diseases so rare they've been told they're undiagnosable. The National Institutes of Health has evaluated hundreds of these cold-case patients in its campus research hospital as part of a pilot program since 2008. Demand is so great, there's a waiting list. So on Tuesday, the agency announced the NIH Undiagnosed Diseases Network, a four-year, $43 million initiative to bring more doctor-detectives on board in the quest to at least put a name to more patients' puzzling symptoms, and eventually find treatments.
Two new reports from the Health and Human Services Department's Inspector General say the new federal healthcare insurance market is having trouble verifying whether people are eligible for the health insurance they are receiving, or the federal subsidies that help them pay their premiums. One of the two Health and Human Services inspector general reports found 2.9 million inconsistencies in the federal marketplace. It said the federal marketplace was unable to resolve 2.6 million of them because the Centers of Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) system for determining eligibility was "not fully operational." The reports looked at the exchanges between October and December of 2013.
Gov. Deval Patrick on Monday quietly signed a bill setting nurse staffing levels inside intensive-care units at one nurse per one patient, depending on the stability of the patient. The private bill-signing was attended by state Rep. Denise Garlick, a Needham Democrat and registered nurse, and Donna Kelly-Williams, president of the Massachusetts Nurses Association, a union that had been pushing for two ballot questions on nurse-patient ratios and CEO pay and hospital financial transparency. Patrick's signature on the bill (H 4228) means the union will drop both initiative petitions, which were headed for the November ballot.