CHICAGO — New research suggests giving patients easier-to-take medicine and no-copay medical visits can help drive down high blood pressure, a major contributor to poor health and untimely deaths nationwide. Those efforts were part of a big health care provider's eight-year program, involving more than 300,000 patients with high blood pressure. At the beginning, less than half had brought their blood pressure under control. That increased to a remarkable 80 percent, well above the national average, the researchers said. The research involved Kaiser Permanente in Northern California, a network of 21 hospitals and 73 doctors' offices, which makes coordinating treatment easier than in independent physicians' offices.
(Reuters Health) - Older patients may think they understand everything doctors tell them when they are released from the hospital, but a new U.S. study found several gaps in what they remember and areas where instructions could be clearer. Out of nearly 400 patients discharged from a large academic medical center, 96 percent reported knowing why they had been hospitalized, but only about 60 percent could accurately describe their diagnoses, for instance. "Patients were very positive, but when we asked them about actual facts, they could not tell us," said Dr. Leora Horwitz, the study's lead author from the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut.
Dr. Venkat Warren worries in a recent Wall Street Journal article that "some bean-counter will decide what performance is," and fears that the application of big data analytics and the pressure to meet a long list of performance metrics might force clinicians to avoid caring for older and sicker patients who could drag down their performance numbers. "If it isn't cost-cutting, what is it?" says Warren, a cardiologist in California's MemorialCare Health System. Many doctors also rightly point out that their scores in a pay-for-performance system are not completely under their control.
A former Northwestern University student claims that after she was admitted to an Illinois hospital for extreme intoxication, a doctor there took photos of her and posted them to social media sites with commentary about her condition. Elena Chernyakova filed suit in the Cook County Circuit Court against Dr. Vinaya Puppala, the Feinberg School of Medicine and the Northwestern Memorial Hospital on Aug. 15, claiming invasion of privacy and infliction of emotional distress. Puppala is a fellow in the Multidisciplinary Pain Medicine Fellowship at Feinberg, which works in conjunction with Northwestern Memorial Hospital, according to court documents.
A decade ago, largely in response to widespread concerns that tired residents were making too many errors, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education enacted nationwide rules that limited the number of consecutive hours residents can work. Five years later, a review of the data suggested that, on average, the rules had failed to make our nation's teaching hospitals any safer. Proponents of the reforms argued that the rules had neither gone far enough nor been properly enforced. Accordingly, in 2011, first-year residents were limited even more—to sixteen-hour shifts, rather than the thirty hours previously allowed. Training programs scrambled to comply.
HOUSTON — If Texas wants to tailor its own expansion of health care coverage through the Affordable Care Act, then it's now up to state leaders to reach out to the federal government to have a dialogue, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Monday. During a visit to Houston promoting the implementation of the health care law with local leaders and community groups, Sebelius said the Obama Administration remains eager to have conversations with Texas about expanding health care coverage in the state. But, she said, key discussions about expanding Medicaid to provide health insurance to those who cannot afford it must first occur at the state level, not between Washington, D.C., and Texas.