The state Senate unanimously approved a bill on Thursday that would limit staffing in hospital intensive care units, a day after the bill received unanimous support in the House. As the Boston Business Journal reported earlier today, it was expected the Senate would approve the bill. The bill will soon head to Gov. Deval Patrick, who is expected to support the measure. The bill says that a nurse cannot be assigned more than one patient in an intensive care unit setting, and in certain circumstances, no more than two patients.
Salesforce, the cloud pioneer known for customer management software, is going into health care. In an announcement on Thursday, Salesforce and Philips, the Dutch electronics maker, are jointly announcing what they call an "open cloud-based, health care platform." That means, they say, health care software developers, producers of medical devices, health care providers and insurance companies will be able to link to the Salesforce health cloud. The foray into health care is a significant step by Salesforce into a specific industry, as opposed to supplying offerings that span industries, like customer relationship management software as a service.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is getting a makeover. It wants new health ideas to go viral. It wants partners in business and government, to magnify its impact. And it seeks game-changing ideas from inventors to improve doctor visits and reshape medicine into a "culture of health." The nation's largest health philanthropy has long been focused on discrete health problems such as smoking and obesity. But in a major policy shift publicly discussed Wednesday for the first time, the Princeton-based foundation is seeking to up its game and inspire mass movements.
One of the top stated goals of the federal Meaningful Use program encouraging adoption of electronic health records (EHR) technology is to improve patient safety. But is there really a cause-and-effect relationship between digitizing health records and reducing medical errors? Poorly implemented health information technology can also introduce new errors, whether from scrambled data or confusing user interfaces, sometimes causing harm to flesh-and-blood patients. This is the issue we will tackle in our InformationWeek Radio show, Is Digitizing Healthcare Making It Less Safe?, Tuesday, July 1, at 2 p.m. EST. My guest for the show will be Scot M. Silverstein, M.D., a consultant and professor in the Drexel University informatics program who researches the shortcomings of EHR software. He also tracks the literature on EHR risks and offers his interpretations on the Health Care Renewal blog, where he posts as InformaticsMD.
Does a preference for "meaningful" work necessitate a lifetime of modest compensation? Not for those who choose to go into medicine. That's the finding of a new study from the online salary- and benefits-tracking company PayScale. Using data collected from about 374,000 PayScale site visitors, researchers at PayScale found that doctors tended to have the best combination of high compensation and a positive response to the question "Does your job make the world a better place?" Overall, the group with the best combination of meaning and money is surgeons, 94% of whom report finding their work meaningful and whose median compensation was just shy of $300,000. They did, however, also report high levels of stress.
Climate change is happening, and with that will come more deaths from heat-related illness and disease, according to a report released Tuesday. The report, spearheaded and funded by investor and philanthropist Thomas Steyer, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, examines many of the effects of climate change for business and individuals. Dr. Al Sommer, the dean emeritus of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, was on the committee that oversaw the development of the report. He says that often overlooked in the current debate about greenhouse gases and climate change is the effect of global warming on individuals and hospitals.