President Barack Obama made two big promises during his first term that have tied his economic agenda in a straitjacket. One was his mostly-kept pledge not to raise taxes on families making less than $250,000 a year -- that is, 98 percent of Americans. The other was his promise about health care reform: "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan." The latter pledge forced Obama try to do two things at once: keep employer-based coverage for the 45 percent of Americans who have it, while getting coverage to the 17 percent of Americans who don't have any at all.
Hospitals can't survive without a cadre of doctors who have a real stake in the hospital's success. Most doctors can't survive in small private practice. But the obvious way to mesh their interests ? physician employment by hospitals or practice acquisitions ? is losing its luster in many corners, so a new strain of strategic creativity is blossoming. The goal: how to work together without living together. "More sophistication is coming to the market place," said Steve Messinger, a hospital strategist and managing partner at ECG Management Consultants Inc. in Arlington.
Boxes of medical records for more than 1,400 patients of Jackson Health System have been missing since January, the hospital system reported Friday, after mailing letters to affected patients informing them of the privacy breach and offering free credit protection services — even though Jackson administrators say Social Security numbers, credit card numbers and financial statements were not contained in the documents. Matthew Pinzur, a Jackson spokesman, said the boxes of records went missing from the Health Information Management department, which handles all patient medical records, and that the missing documents were either on their way to be scanned electronically or returning from the process.
Bo Hash arrived at St. Rose Dominican Hospitals — Rose de Lima Campus with two Bounty paper towels wrapped around his bloodied right hand and his thumb in a red Dixie cup. Not more than an hour earlier, the thumb had been caught in a rodeo rope, popping it off his hand. Even through the pain, his instincts from his job as a Progressive insurance agent kicked in. First he found his thumb and put it on ice, then he called St. Rose. His health insurance policy had a high deductible, and Hash wanted to avoid two hospital bills.
WASHINGTON — Aging Americans worried about their droopy upper eyelids often rely on the plastic surgeon's scalpel to turn back the hands of time. Increasingly, Medicare is footing the bill. The public health insurance program for people over 65 typically does not cover cosmetic surgery, but for cases in which a patient's sagging eyelids significantly hinder their vision, it does pay to have them lifted. In recent years, though, a rapid rise in the number of so-called functional eyelid lifts, or blepharoplasty, has led some to question whether Medicare is letting procedures that are really cosmetic slip through the cracks – at a cost of millions of dollars.
A new study argues that some doctors make only minimal use of electronic health records (EHRs) not because they're Luddites, but because their style of practice "absorbs" clinical uncertainty rather than trying to minimize it through the use of IT. If this is true, the widespread adoption of EHRs may not change how some doctors diagnose and treat patients. The study, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), used interviews and direct observations of 28 physicians in a Texas multispecialty group to explore the reasons why some doctors used the practice's EHR more than others did.