Some emergency room doctors in the Denver area are restricting the types and amounts of addictive painkillers they administer, citing a nationwide increase in overdose deaths. Denver Health' emergency room will stop filling long-term prescriptions for such painkillers as Percocet, OxyContin and Vicodin, the Denver Post reported Saturday. The hospital will also try to limit prescriptions for acute-care painkillers to small amounts to last only until patients can contact their regular physicians. University of Colorado Health is writing policies that would end the practice of filling prescriptions that patients claim were lost or stolen.
A new study suggests that "e-visits" to health-care providers for sinus infections and urinary tract infections (UTIs) may be cheaper than in-person office visits and similarly effective. For e-visits, patients fill out online forms about their symptoms and a doctor or nurse gets back to them within a few hours with treatment advice. In the study, the main difference between e-visits and office visits was that patients who received their care online were prescribed more antibiotics, a finding that could be concerning but is hard to interpret on its own, researchers said.
Hospitals are getting super-sized. Waiting room chairs are being built with wrought iron for heavy patients. Wheelchairs and beds are made to sustain extra weight. And toilets are being mounted to the floor, not the wall. In response to America's obesity epidemic, health-care facilities nationwide are making accommodations to make sure they can take care of their heaviest patients.
A coalition of 21 hospital associations is asking the White House to help fight a provision of President Obama's healthcare law that they say will cost them billions of dollars. Hospital associations from 20 states sent a letter to Obama this week arguing that a change to his healthcare law ought to be included in the next White House budget proposal. At issue is a provision that allows hospitals in Massachusetts to dramatically boost their Medicare payments at the expense of other states.
The most eagerly awaited—if not anxiety-laden—set of regulations in the healthcare spectrum arrived late Thursday: HHS issued modifications to the HIPAA Privacy, Security, Enforcement, and Breach Notification Rules. "This final rule is comprised of four final rules," HHS explains in the document, "which have been combined to reduce the impact and number of times certain compliance activities need to be undertaken by the regulated entities."
Highmark and West Penn Allegheny Health System officials have reached an agreement with bondholders on a debt-reduction deal. Highmark has offered to purchase $726 million in outstanding series 2007A bonds issued for WPAHS for 87.5 cents on the dollar, resulting in a savings of about $100 million for Highmark. With the deal, officials said West Penn Allegheny will avoid a bankruptcy filing and preserve pensions for the health system's 12,000 employees. The deal means Highmark will be paying off about $635 million of the WPAHS debt.