WASHINGTON -- Employees at a Veterans Administration hospital in Mississippi have reported a range of "serious wrongdoing," including improperly sterilized instruments and missed diagnoses of fatal illnesses, an independent federal investigative agency said in a letter to the White House. The agency said the allegations raise doubt about the facility's ability to care for veterans. In the letter sent Monday to the White House and Congress, the Office of Special Counsel said an initial 2009 report by a whistle-blower employee at the G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery VA Medical Center in Jackson, Miss., alleged that the staff routinely failed to properly clean and sterilize reusable medical equipment such as scalpels and bone cutters.
Physical therapy can be just as good for a common injury and at far less cost and risk, the most rigorous study to compare these treatments concludes. Therapy didn't always help and some people wound up having surgery for the problem, called a torn meniscus. But those who stuck with therapy had improved as much six months and one year later as those who were given arthroscopic surgery right away, researchers found. "Both are very good choices. It would be quite reasonable to try physical therapy first because the chances are quite good that you'll do quite well," said one study leader, Dr. Jeffrey Katz, a joint specialist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
The Federal Trade Commission is moving ahead with its fight against the merger of Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital and Palmyra Medical Center in Albany, reports Georgia Health News. The FTC last week lifted a stay on the case and has directed an administrative law judge to set a new hearing date on the antitrust issues "as soon as is practicable,'' but no later than July 15, GHN reports. GHN adds that the U.S. Supreme Court in February gave the FTC a preliminary victory in its two-year fight against the merger.
Healthcare care providers and health plan organizations involved in accountable care consider analytics applications their top investment priority, according to a new report by IDC Health Insights. In IDC's survey of 40 hospitals and 30 insurers, 50% of respondents said their highest investment priority was advanced analytics. Forty-six percent were placing their chips on data warehousing, which is closely associated with the use of analytics. The latter figure is higher than that in a 2011 survey by HIMSS Analytics, which found that only 30% of healthcare providers had data warehouses. But the IDC number includes health insurers, most of whom have data warehouses, noted Cynthia Burghard, IDC's research director of accountable care IT strategies, in an interview with Information Week Healthcare.
Legislation to strengthen violence prevention standards at health care facilities across the state has been withdrawn in the Senate -- ending its chances for passage in Annapolis this session. Sen. Katherine Klausmeier, a Baltimore County Democrat and the bill's sponsor, said she submitted a withdrawal letter to the finance committee Monday after stakeholders representing nursing homes and assisted living facilities expressed concerns that it would not leave room for individualized approaches to dealing with violence in varying clinical environments. "There were just so many different ways of providing safety, so we decided to just withdraw the bill," Klausmeier said.
NEW YORK - The State University of New York has voted, once again, to close Long Island College Hospital, citing financial difficulties. The vote took place Tuesday afternoon at Purchase College, 30 miles north of the Cobble Hill hospital, after a Brooklyn judge ruled last week that SUNY's Board of Trustees had to hold a public meeting on the closure to comply with the Open Meetings Law. "The Board of Trustees today took the difficult but necessary step of supporting the decision to close Long Island College Hospital," SUNY said in a press release.