There's nothing simple about the proposed affiliation between Faxton St. Luke's Healthcare and St. Elizabeth Medical Center. If the affiliation makes it through state and federal scrutiny, it would join three hospital campuses, more than two dozen community sites, $500 million in annual revenues and 4,700 employees under the umbrella of an active parent organization to be known as the Mohawk Valley Health System. Blending all that into one health system, while keeping St. Elizabeth Roman Catholic and Faxton St. Luke's secular, is not an exercise for the faint of heart.
The victory of Watson, an artificial-intelligence system designed to dominate the quiz show Jeopardy!, over the country's best nerds in 2011 may not be the equal of John Henry struggling against a steam-powered drill in the annals of man versus machine. But the replacement of Jeopardy!'s human competitors with a computer algorithm may signal a trend that could soon spread through the health care sector as Obamacare is implemented. That's the prophecy of venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. Khosla, a prominent Silicon Valley investor, has predicted that computers will replace 80 percent of what doctors do in a couple of decades.
The air we breathe is laced with cancer-causing substances and should now be classified as carcinogenic to humans, the World Health Organisation's (WHO) cancer agency said on Thursday. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) cited data indicating that in 2010, 223,000 deaths from lung cancer worldwide resulted from air pollution, and said there was also convincing evidence it increases the risk of bladder cancer. The WHO is a Geneva-based agency of the United Nations focused on international public health matters.
Heads of U.S. nonprofit hospitals earn an average of almost $600,000 a year, compensation that isn't tied to quality measures such as mortality rates, a Harvard University study found. The chief executive officers paid the most oversee larger, urban hospitals that are usually teaching institutions and have a median salary of more than $1.66 million, according to research published today in JAMA Internal Medicine. The top executives paid the least – a median of $117,933 – are most often at small, non-teaching facilities in rural areas. The findings are among the first to detail how much nonprofit hospital CEOs are paid and the variations in salaries, said Ashish Jha, the study's senior author.
When Dr. Ken Ong, now chief medical information officer (CMIO) for New York Hospital Queens, began his medical career, he was treating infectious diseases. It was the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic and, he states flatly, "We knew nothing." Only by working closely with patients could Ong and his colleagues begin to determine which drugs made AIDS a largely treatable condition. Years later, patient engagement has emerged as a key strategy for not just treating chronic conditions but also providing better, more collaborative and more efficient healthcare.
Experts predict that the federal government has about a month to get Healthcare.gov in fighting shape if it wants to get 7 million people enrolled in its first year, Reuters reported on Monday. Users are still experiencing issues with the federal exchange, which puts enrollment numbers at risk and gives Republicans more reason to say the law should have been delayed. While state-run exchanges have been running relative smoothly and enrolling thousands, the federal government, which runs exchanges for 36 states, has declined to say how many individuals have enrolled in insurance plans. Anonymous sources in the Department of Health and Human Services told the Daily Mail that there were just 51,000 completed applications during the program's first week.