Paul Hawks, an electrician for the Florida Department of Transportation, was one of more than 4,500 people in the United States in the past 25 years who have donated a section of their liver while still alive. Death is rare—besides Paul, three other donors have died since 1999. The relatives of the other donors—they died in 1999, 2002 and 2010 —have gone public, but this is the first time Lorraine has discussed her husband's death. The Department of Public Health report gives a rare and gruesome picture of a surgical procedure gone horribly wrong. The department's account is based on medical records, operating room communications and two days of interviews with the attending transplant surgeon and other doctors, nurses and administrators.
Vanderbilt MBA student Baxter Webb's startup, MEDarchon, will be among 100 businesses featured at a boot camp at Stanford University, which will include talks led by people behind companies including Google and TiVo. In addition to the feedback, fortunate participants could leave with leads on potential sources of funding. MEDarchon is going after a share of the estimated $20 billion spent nationwide each year to prevent medical errors, plus a $2 billion-a-year medical communications market. It's developing an electronic paging system with cloud-based technology to improve communication among doctors, nurses and others, and reduce errors at hospitals and clinics.
Some of the molasses-slow payment problems blamed on a local Medi-Cal plan are caused by billing middlemen still adapting to new claims requirements, said the plan's claims officials. The staff at Gold Coast Health Plan and the company it contracts to process claims, ACS, are reaching out to billing companies to try to resolve lingering complaints about payments that appear to be months behind. Ken Dixon, account executive for ACS, said some of the problems have been triggered by the federal government's mandate that electronic claims be submitted on a new format called 5010.
Geographic data firm Esri has put together a county-by-county map of which parts of the country have the greatest need for doctors right now. In the map below (click through for an interactive version), the dark blue counties have a very low need for physicians, with fewer than 1,000 people per doctor's office. If anything, this map illustrates how much where you live matters for how much healthcare you have access to. The 17,000 residents of Clark County, MS do not have a single primary care doctor in the area. Up in Manhattan there is one doctor for every 500 people.
Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments regarding, among other topics, the individual mandate provision of Affordable Care Act. On Wednesday, at the Health Law, Bioethics & Human Rights Department at Boston University School of Public Health, a panel of three legal scholars eflected on last week’s Supreme Court proceedings and explained what the arguments really were addressing.