Children's Hospital Oakland, which has had its share of financial and other troubles in recent years, may soon be joining forces with UCSF's Benioff Children's Hospital. In a letter to the medical staff of the 190-bed Children's Hospital & Research Center Oakland last week, CEO Bertram Lubin said talks, initiated by UCSF, "have progressed with great enthusiasm and respect on both sides." Neither side would disclose details of the talks. Mark Laret, CEO of UCSF Medical Center, said the two organizations are "engaged in discussions to develop a stronger affiliation between Benioff Children's Hospital and Children's Hospital & Research Center Oakland. The specific structure is still under review by both organizations."
New York has corralled three Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIOs) and three health IT vendors to participate in the Statewide Health Information Network of New York (SHIN-NY). As an increasing number of N.Y.-based private practices, nursing homes, clinics, and hospitals are using electronic health records (EHRs), many have connected their systems to RHIOs in their part of the state. A recent announcement made by the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC), along with the New York State Department of Health, said the three RHIOs include the Brooklyn Health Information Exchange, the e-Health Network of Long Island, and the Taconic Health Information Network and Community (THINC). They're joined by vendors HealthUnity, IBM, and InterSystems.
Controlling diabetes and reducing costly hospital stays are two goals of Jeffrey Brenner, the nonprofit Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers' executive director and a physician with Cooper University Hospital. Backed by several large grants, including a recent $2.8 million federal Health Care Innovation Award, Brenner and his team are undertaking one of the nation's most important healthcare experiments. They aim to halt the inexorable rise in health costs in part by caring for patients more effectively in one of the country's poorest cities. Much of their focus is on diabetes. "If you improve the care for diabetics," Brenner said, "you improve the care for lots of complex patients."
Doctors who ran OhioHealth Corp.'s cardiology practice in Springfield before becoming Ohio State University employees will be banned from practicing medicine in Clark County through October 2013, under a consent judgment reached late Monday. They also must pay OhioHealth a total of $125,000 as part of the settlement in Franklin County Common Pleas Court. OhioHealth, which includes Riverside, Dublin Methodist, Grant Medical Center and other hospitals, sued the cardiologists' independent practice, Heart Specialists of Ohio, on Nov. 1 after the cardiologists announced they were joining OhioHealth competitor Wexner Medical Center of Ohio State.
The Boston Globe reports today that women physician-scientists lose more than $350,000 in salary over the course of a 30-year career and much of the blame is being placed on women's failure to ask. The blame-placing is anecdotal, but research in other professions suggests that we women have much to do with the wage, income and leadership gaps we suffer. Yet I've had the sad task of reporting here that women lawyers feel bullied out of origination credit, women in science hesitate to patent their inventions, and women in business fail to seek raises.
The Relative Value Update Committee, known as the RUC is a committee of the AMA. It meets every four months in a hotel conference room. Attendees might hear heated debates between some three dozen doctors over which procedures should be worth and which ones Medicare should pay higher prices for. But RUC meetings are invitation only. Observers are sworn to secrecy. Even the names of the doctors on this private committee were—until recently —kept confidential.