Hospital administrators tend to agree that it's a good idea to have emergency departments offer palliative care, according to a new study. But one of the biggest barriers to getting palliative care in the ER is the physicians. "There's a stigma that palliative care is the same as end of life care, the same as hospice," said Dr. Corita Grudzen, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor in the department of emergency medicine at Mount Sinai Medical School. Administrators felt that emergency physicians don't have the time to discuss how much intervention patients want. One said, "'emergency physicians have a limited ability to focus on anything other than the 300 patients they're going to see today.'"
Called RP-VITA, the robot allows doctors to virtually visit patients in distant locations, carrying on conversations and even taking measurements in real time. Equipped with cameras, microphones, 3-D mapping sensors, a stethoscope, and a video screen "head" that automatically swivels to listen to voices, the robot transmits and receives video, audio, and navigation instructions over a Wi-Fi broadband connection. Doctors, patients, and hospital staff control the robot with a specialized terminal or via a software application that runs on Apple Inc.'s iPad tablet computer, and talk to one another using a Skype-like video chat displayed on the robot's main screen.
The number of rating downgrades for non-profit hospitals outpaced upgrades in the first quarter of 2012, Moody's Investors Service said on Monday, adding it remains cautious about the effects of a slow economic recovery, federal deficit cutting measures and state budget pressures on the sector. The ratio of downgrades to upgrades was 1.33 to 1, Moody's said. "The increased proportion of downgrades is driven by the continued slow economic recovery, increasing pressure on state budgets, and a large and growing federal deficit that may lead to reductions in Medicare and Medicaid which translate into weak volumes and revenue declines," Moody's said in a statement, noting that it is maintaining its long-standing negative outlook on the sector.
Health and Human Services Commission's Office of Inspector General's dollar-recovery strategy—which includes an increased reliance on a rule that allows investigators to freeze financing for any health provider accused of overbilling—has enraged doctors, dentists and other providers who treat Medicaid patients. They say an anonymous call to a fraud hotline or a computer-generated analysis of a handful of billing codes is enough to halt their financing without so much as a hearing, jeopardizing their practices and employees and leaving thousands of needy patients in a lurch while the state works to prove—or rule out—abuse.
McLean-based Science Applications International Corp. plans to add more than 1,300 employees to its health business with its planned acquisition of Westfield, Ind.-based MaxIT Healthcare Holdings, announced last week. The deal marks the latest contractor move into health information technology and follows the Supreme Court's recent decision allowing President Obama's healthcare law to move forward. Contractors are aggressively buying up health IT businesses in hopes of positioning themselves to win work modernizing health systems and records at the state and federal level and at commercial healthcare providers.
The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) announced Monday the start of a public comment period for its landmark draft Methodology Report, which proposes standards for the conduct of patient-centered outcomes research Feedback received during the 54-day comment period, which ends at 11:59 p.m. ET Friday, September 14, will be analyzed for potential incorporation into a revised version of the report that is to be considered for adoption by the PCORI Board of Governors at its November 2012 public meeting in Boston.