Five patients at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center were unwittingly infected during valve replacement surgeries earlier this year because of tiny tears in a heart surgeon's latex gloves, hospital officials said. Four of the patients needed a second operation and are still recovering. The outbreak in June led to investigations by the hospital and both the Los Angeles County and state departments of public health, the newspaper said. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was also consulted. The surgeon, whose name was not released, was not allowed to operate again until he healed. He is still a member of the medical staff but no longer performs surgeries.
Aetna and other insurers that initially fought President Obama's health-care overhaul are reversing course, funding a group planning to spend $100 million to help the uninsured get coverage under the law. Enroll America, a nonprofit created two years ago, has gathered support from the insurers that opposed the law and consumer organizations such as Washington-based Families USA that supported it. The new organization plans a broad-based educational campaign to make uninsured people aware of the health-care law's benefits and help them sign up, said Ron Pollack, Enroll America's chairman.
In 2010, Lancaster General Health notched record revenues of nearly $1 billion. But its annual surplus fell for the fourth straight year. Though destitute by no means, galloping expenses and uncertainty in the marketplace were hammering LGH's business model, prompting changes. Two units were closed, some positions were eliminated, and 170 employees were reassigned. Yet even as the bottom line eroded, there was little austerity in the executive suites. In 2010, each of 21 executives systemwide would earn total compensation—salary, bonuses and incentives, benefits and expenses—of at least $250,000, according to LGH's Internal Revenue Service Form 990, the annual financial report that nonprofit health systems such as LGH must file with the federal government.
In a scathing review of three experimental surgeries at the UC Davis Medical Center, federal regulators found that deficiencies were so severe the 619-bed hospital "lacks the capacity to render adequate care to patients." The 92-page report from investigators for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services concluded that hospital administrators repeatedly failed to rein in the activities of two UC Davis neurosurgeons, who performed untested treatments on three critically ill brain cancer patients.
A federal judge on Friday sentenced a doctor to 20 years in prison and ordered her to repay nearly $8.2 million for fraud at a former Mississippi cancer center she ran. U.S. District Judge Daniel P. Jordan III said he was "appalled" at how Dr. Meera Sachdeva treated patients at a vulnerable time of their lives. Syringes were re-used and different patients' chemotherapy drugs were drawn from the same bag at Rose Cancer Center in the small town of Summit, Jordan said. He said prosecutors were unable to prove drugs were watered down, as they originally believed.
With the opening of its new VA hospital in Lake Nona slated for next year, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is considering what to do with the aging VA clinic that sits on a piece of highly valuable real estate between Winter Park and Baldwin Park near downtown Orlando. The 44-acre site includes a collection of 1970s buildings in which about 2,000 VA employees serve hundreds of thousands of local vets annually, mostly on an outpatient basis. As plans finally emerged for building Central Florida's first VA hospital in southeast Orlando, VA officials said the clinic by Lake Baldwin would close and the services provided there would move to the new site. But the VA now says the region's growing population of military veterans is likely to justify a decision by the agency to keep the Lake Baldwin property.