A big, red, seven-digit number isn't the best welcome for a new CEO. But it's the greeting Erlanger's new top executive received at his first finance meeting Monday night. In its worst month this fiscal year, Erlanger lost almost $5 million in March, Chief Financial Officer Britt Tabor told the hospital's Budget and Finance Committee. March's shortfall doubled year-to-date losses from where they were the previous month. After nine months of fluctuating monthly financial reports, Erlanger's year-to-date losses now stand at $9.4 million. That's better than where the hospital was at this time last year -- about $17 million in the red -- but it's still not "where the hospital should be," said Tabor.
For the first time, the government will make information about financial relationships between doctors, teaching hospitals and drug manufacturers publicly available. To comply with a provision in the Affordable Care Act, drug and device manufacturers, along with group purchasing organizations, will have to disclose all of their payments and other compensation to physicians and teaching hospitals. Those who don't comply could be fined. The information will be gathered beginning in August and disclosed by Sept. 30, 2014 on a new website of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The site is part of the National Physician Payment Transparency Program, an effort to bring the financial relationships to light.
In a sign of the rapid progress being made by some of the dozens wounded in the Boston Marathon bombings, doctors at Boston Medical Center said today they hoped to see a "mass exodus" of patients from their hospital into rehabilitation facilities. On April 15, BMC received 23 patients, 15 of whom were deemed to be in critical condition. As of today, with 11 patients remaining, just one of those endangered patients is in critical condition. Seven are in stable condition, and three are in serious condition, doctor said today. Dr. Jeffrey Kalish told reporters today that patients who underwent life-saving amputations are steadily returning to a changed life, but some patients have grown weary of hospital food and are bringing their own in.
Electric fans growl like airplanes taking off and banks of green lights wink in a basement at Mount Sinai's medical school, where a new $3 million supercomputer makes quick work of huge amounts of genetic and other biological information. Just a couple of miles away, a competitor, Weill Cornell Medical College and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell hospital are building a $650 million research tower. Across the street is a newly completed $550 million tower housing labs for another competitor, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Major academic medical centers in New York and around the country are spending and recruiting heavily in what has become an arms race within the war on cancer.
In the dozen years since the Da Vinci robot has been approved for surgeries in the United States, it's been embraced by health care providers and patients alike. Surgeons routinely use the multi-armed metal assistant to remove cancerous prostate glands and uteruses, repair heart valves and perform gastric bypass operations, among many other procedures. Lately a key study and reports of problems have raised questions about robotic surgery's safety and cost-effectiveness, leading to a review of the Da Vinci system by the Food and Drug Administration and causing some experts to wonder whether the benefits of undergoing robot-assisted surgery may have been overstated.
A stronger U.S. economy will contribute to a rise in the growth of healthcare costs over the next six years, ending the current record-breaking slowdown, according to a new study. The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) predicted that by 2019, annual healthcare cost growth will be closer to historic averages — over 7 percent compared to 3.9 percent between 2009 and 2011. "As the economy recovers, health spending is likely to trend upwards, though growth rates are unlikely to return to the double-digit levels we have seen in the past," the authors wrote.