Is the electronic health record falling short of its promise and contributing to physician burnout because it saddles doctors with ever-increasing administrative tasks? Yes, thinks Dr. Michael Murphy, an ER physician who co founded ScribeAmerica a decade ago. "Physicians feel taken away from patients and families," Murphy told InformationWeek in a phone interview. "They're spending three hours a night filling out [the EHR]." Physicians today spend, on average, eight to 12 minutes per patient filling out the EHR, according to a number of studies.
Vermont's largest health care provider has had few problems with patients using health insurance provided by the state's new health care exchange since coverage began Jan. 1, an official said Wednesday. The report from Burlington's Fletcher Allen Health Care comes as the Department of Vermont Health Access continues to overcome technical problems on the Vermont Health Connect website and enroll people in health insurance policies provided by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont and MVP Healthcare. Shannon Lonergan, director of registration at Burlington's Fletcher Allen Health Care, said only a small percentage of the thousands of patients the hospital and its affiliated offices see every day have been covered by insurance provided through Vermont Health Connect.
Experts on Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare but fatal brain disease, say there hasn't been a documented case of transmission from contaminated surgical instruments since the 1970s, when sterilization techniques were more primitive. But there is still a risk. And that's what Novant Health officials are now explaining to 18 patients and their families after apologizing Monday for exposing those patients to surgical instruments that had been used on a CJD patient at Forsyth Medical Center in Winston-Salem. "There's no excuse for this. It should never have happened," said Florence Kranitz, president of the Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Foundation in New York. "I know the hospital is apologizing. People are always tragically sorry for what happens."
Big retail stores, hotels, restaurants and other companies with lots of low-wage and part-time workers are among the main beneficiaries of the Obama administration's latest tweak to health care rules. Companies with 100 or more workers will be able to avoid the biggest of two potential employer penalties in the Affordable Care Act by offering coverage to 70 percent of their full-timers. That target is considerably easier to hit than the administration's previous requirement of 95 percent, but the wiggle room is only good for next year.
CVS is set to quit smoking, but don't expect the drugstore to get all-around healthy. CVS Caremark announced last week that its retail stores would cut out all tobacco by Oct. 2014, citing a commitment to customer health. "Put simply," president and CEO Larry J. Merlo said, "the sale of tobacco products is inconsistent with our purpose." That reasoning has raised a few eyebrows in light of other products sold in CVS stores—candy, junk food, and alcohol, for example. If cutting out tobacco is part of becoming a "health care marketplace," then shouldn't unhealthy foods and beverages come next? Apparently not.
One of the largest and most meticulous studies of mammography ever done, involving 90,000 women and lasting a quarter-century, has added powerful new doubts about the value of the screening test for women of any age. It found that the death rates from breast cancer and from all causes were the same in women who got mammograms and those who did not. And the screening had harms: One in five cancers found with mammography and treated was not a threat to the woman's health and did not need treatment such as chemotherapy, surgery or radiation. The study, published Tuesday in The British Medical Journal, is one of the few rigorous evaluations of mammograms conducted in the modern era of more effective breast cancer treatments.