Dignity Health, which operates dozens of hospitals in Arizona, California and Nevada, and giant tech vendor Optum have formed a joint venture to simplify vexing complexities in the realm of hospital billing and cost transparency. Dignity, based in San Francisco, will be the new venture's first client, reports sister paper, the San Francisco Business Times. Optum is a health care IT and technology unit of giant UnitedHealthcare. Both are divisions of Minneapolis-based UnitedHealth Group.
Ben Olmedo traveled from Afghanistan to Alaska to find the gaps he wanted to fill. Wisconsin-born Carrie Kowalski found her niche in Venice Beach, Calif. And Vicki Chan-Padgett found her space full of needy women and children in Las Vegas 30 years after she first trained as an Air Force medic. The three physician assistants are already helping to fill the many holes in the U.S. health care system, providing tests, counseling and other basic care when a doctor is unavailable. They expect to get busier as health care reform starts making it easier for people to pay for medical care.
For more than a century, researchers were puzzled by the uncanny ability of cancer cells to evade the immune system. They knew cancer cells were grotesquely abnormal and should be killed by white blood cells. In the laboratory, in Petri dishes, white blood cells could go on the attack against cancer cells. Why, then, could cancers survive in the body? The answer, when it finally came in recent years, arrived with a bonus: a way to thwart a cancer's strategy. Researchers discovered that cancers wrap themselves in an invisible protective shield. And they learned that they could break into that shield with the right drugs.
Remote patient monitoring, a type of telehealth, is finally starting to become a factor in U.S. healthcare. The reasons, as usual, have to do with money. Medicare now penalizes hospitals financially if too many of their patients wind up back in the hospital within 30 days, so some organizations are monitoring high-risk patients at home to head off complications. And the emergence of accountable care organizations (ACOs) and value-based reimbursement gives providers a fresh incentive to monitor patients with serious chronic conditions between visits. Don't let all those people wearing Fitbits and Nike FuelBands mislead you, though. Remote monitoring in the clinical world remains far from a mass-market trend.
One of the country's largest and most profitable hospital chains has been defeated in its effort to take away its nurses' sick days, according to the union that mounted nine strikes there over the past two years. "The nurses would've come to work sick, and the patients' health would've declined," said California Nurses Association Executive Director RoseAnn DeMoro. "Because the nurses would be exposing current patients to the past patients' illnesses." While nurses "take the risk of being around very sick people," DeMoro told Salon, they "are not super-women." According to CNA, eliminating paid sick days was one of nearly 200 concessions sought by California healthcare giant Sutter Health, in negotiations over union contracts covering 3,000 nurses and hundreds of other employees at central California hospitals.
Across Massachusetts, about half of primary care doctors aren't taking new patients, according to the Massachusetts Medical Society's 2013 Patient Access to Care Study. The rate for internal medicine specialists, or internists, who often also serve as primary care doctors, is 55 percent. If you've found a new doctor and want to schedule a routine visit, be prepared to wait. It takes an average of 39 days for new patients to get an appointment with a family physician and 50 days to see an internist. That's better than last year, when the average wait was a whopping 45 days, but up from 29 days in 2010.