Days after filing suit against Olean General Hospital and three pharmaceutical manufacturers, attorneys representing patients potentially exposed to HIV and hepatitis through reused insulin pens say a second lawsuit is underway targeting the VA Western New York Healthcare System. Brown Chiari LLP on Monday filed suit in State Supreme Court for Cattaraugus County, naming Olean General, the Upper Allegheny Health System as well Novo Nordisk Inc., Novo Nordisk Pharmaceutical Industries Inc., Sanofi-Aventis U.S. LLC and as Eli Lilly and Co.
Ordering medications through a computerized provider order entry (CPOE) system decreases the likelihood of medication errors by 48%, according to a new paper in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. Projected nationwide, this means that CPOE averted about 17.4 million errors in 2008, the year of the study. However, the authors note, "It is unclear whether this translates into reduced harm for patients." The study included a meta-analysis of nine papers that compared the medical error rates in hospitals before and after their adoption of CPOE.
The digital age has made what was was once obscure visible. In ways we never could before, we can quantify the world—make it knowable to us, comprehensible to us—by gathering data and identifying patterns and generally converting experience into information. One of the last things to have its outlined sharpened through data's lens, though, has been the object most intimate to us: our own bodies. Medical practice, while still largely undertaken in hospitals and doctors' offices, is expanding out into patients' day-to-day lives. At the TED conference in Long Beach this week, former MIT student and current entrepreneur Myshkin Ingawale introduced uChek, which is, as its name (sort of) hints at, a urine-testing app.
A couple of days ago I fell to talking about price-setting in health care with a certified Very Smart Economist. Bart Wilson is the Donald P Kennedy Professor of Economics and Law at Chapman University, where he works with Vernon Smith, the chap who won the Nobel Prize for helping to invent experimental economics. We had both watched the same web video, where certified Very Smart Health Care Wonks Ezra Klein and Sarah Kliff argued... well, conversed... in favor of some sort of central rate setting to control health care costs.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Tuesday became the eighth Republican governor to endorse the Medicaid expansion in President Obama's healthcare law. Christie's decision is another big political win for Obama and his signature legislative achievement. Although Christie isn't the most conservative governor to accept the Medicaid expansion, he's the most serious contender for the 2016 presidential nomination to sign on.
When we get sick, we don't head straight for the nearest county charitable hospital; we head for the biggest, shiniest facility we can find. The gist of the expert consensus is that as long as we're willing to pay for whatever they decide to do, health care is going to cost an exorbitant amount of money. But what if we actually did take money out of the equation? What if we put doctors on salary and substituted relentless cost-control for "anything goes"? Well, say critics, probably you'd get what everyone complained about with HMOs: a situation where providers have every incentive to undertreat instead of overtreat. There are places where it works. One of them is the Cleveland Clinic, one of the nation's leading hospital centers.