Federal regulators Thursday said they have confirmed the presence of a fungus in an unopened vial of steroids from the troubled Framingham pharmacy at the center of a nationwide meningitis outbreak that matches the type of infection found in most of the sick patients. A release posted on the US Food and Drug Administration website said regulators found fungus known as Exserohilum rostratum in an unopened vial of methylprednisolone acetate from one of the three implicated lots that were shipped by New England Compounding Center to 23 states.
After five years of massive struggles, Jackson Health System finished in the black for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the chief financial officer said Thursday. After losing $419 million the previous three years, Mark Knight said year-end financial adjustments mean Jackson, the safety net hospital for Miami-Dade County's poor and uninsured, will show a slight surplus for the year. Last year, the situation was so dire that a Boston for-profit hospital system offered to take over Jackson to protect the county government from having to pay Jackson's bills if the hospitals couldn't meet payroll.
A state-run health insurance exchange in PA is unlikely to be ready for a scheduled January 2014 rollout. Insurance Commissioner Michael Consedine said development of the online exchange has stalled because too many questions regarding the cost and operations remain unanswered by the federal government. "We want to make smart, informed decisions for Pennsylvanians," he said "We're not going to rush headlong into this and make poor choices."
Knoxville's Blount Memorial Hospital has begun notifying 27,000 patients whose personal information was compromised by the theft of an employee's laptop computer in August. The laptop was reported stolen during a burglary at the staffer's Knoxville residence Aug. 25, said Blount Memorial spokeswoman Jennie Bounds. The password-protected laptop contained registration records from Blount Heart Consultants on approximately 22,000 patients—including their names, dates of birth, responsible party names, addresses, physician names and billing information.
Hospital employees are less healthy and account for more health care costs than the general population, troubling statistics that have Michigan hospitals rethinking the way they do business. Costs for medical care and prescription drugs were 9 percent higher among hospital employees than the U.S. workforce at large, according to a national study. The study analyzed health care claims data for 350,000 hospital employees and their dependents. Hospital employees' admission rates were 46 percent higher for obesity, 20 percent higher for depression and 12 percent higher for asthma compared to the general population.
A judge has taken under advisement the NH state Department of Health and Human Services' request to have broad access to Exeter Hospital's medical records system to aid its ongoing investigation into the hospital's hepatitis C outbreak. He indicated the state may have a limited right to the records with some minimization of its request. Thirty-two Exeter Hospital patients and the alleged infector, David Kwiatkowski, have all tested positive for hepatitis C, and another 28 patients had a past hepatitis C infection cleared by their immune system. Assistant Attorney General Jeanne Herrick indicated the state has concerns that more patients could be affected.