Two years after bowing to outside pressure and suspending its five-figure annual pay for directors, health insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts has notified state regulators that it is reinstating the payments—though at reduced levels and to fewer directors.
After an on-again, off-again relationship of more than 1-1/2 years, University Hospital's partnership with KentuckyOne Health becomes official Friday. But amid planned internal celebrations with cake and balloons, concerns linger over employment issues and the separation of Louisville's only public hospital into two separately managed parts. Hospital officials say their alliance will pump $1.4 billion into University of Louisville health operations over 20 years and improve the health of Kentucky.
State officials and leaders of the Louisiana Children's Medical Center hope the private company will take over management of New Orleans' public hospital by June 24, with the deal ready for approval by state boards as soon as next month. At a meeting on Thursday, officials said they wanted the deal cemented before the new fiscal year begins July 1. The quick timetable means that employees of the Interim LSU Public Hospital could be receiving layoff notices over the next two months.
Medical educators have long understood that good doctoring, like ducks, elephants and obscenity, is easy to recognize but difficult to quantify. And nowhere is the need to catalog those qualities more explicit, and charged, than in the third year of medical school, when students leave the lecture halls and begin to work with patients and other clinicians in specialty-based courses referred to as "clerkships." In these clerkships, students are evaluated by senior doctors and ranked on their nascent doctoring skills, with the highest-ranking students going on to the most competitive training programs and jobs.
Smokers need not apply. That's the word from Orlando Health, which announced this evening that it will start a tobacco-free hiring policy at seven of its hospitals starting in April. The move is part of a controversial nationwide trend, in which hospitals are leading the way. Current Orlando Health employees who smoke will be exempt from the policy, but new hires must not use tobacco in any form, said hospital system spokeswoman Kena Lewis.
Hospital readmission rates for Medicare patients are dropping after increasing for more than five years as the 2010 U.S. health-care law begins levying penalties for excessive numbers of repeat patient visits. Thirty-day readmission rates fell to 17.8 percent late last year after averaging 19 percent for the past five, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said today on its website. The decline translates to 70,000 fewer readmissions in 2012 for Medicare, the U.S. health plan for the elderly and disabled.