St. Joseph's Regional Medical Center and a department chairman who told a group of doctors he would "separate their skulls from their bodies" if they disobeyed him must pay the doctors $1.27 million, a Bergen County jury has decided. The suit centered on Dr. Roger P. Kierce's management of the OB/GYN department and the handling of the doctors' complaints by hospital administrators, including William McDonald, the chief executive. No problems with the quality of medical care were alleged.
Starting in 2012, health insurance plans in Texas—and most of the rest of the country—may have to cough up millions of dollars in rebates to customers. The rebates will come from health plans that spend too much on administrative costs instead of medical care. The change is part of the national health overhaul law, the Affordable Care Act. But state officials in Texas and 16 other states have asked to push back the requirement for a few years.
Most provisions of the Affordable Care Act will likely move forward even if the U.S. Supreme Court rejects the mandate requiring individuals to buy health insurance. That viewpoint was offered Tuesday by Mark Neaman, CEO of NorthShore University HealthSystem, as he gave a provider's perspective on the new health-care law. "My own personal view is that whether the individual mandate stands or is overturned, it will not overturn the rest of the act," said Neaman.
African-Americans now make up 4 percent of U.S. physicians overall. But while this statistic keeps inching up, it conceals a troubling trend: The number of African-American men entering medical fields has been falling since it peaked in the early 1990s, and it continues to drop, both here in Pittsburgh and across the United States. Gateway Medical Society is affiliated with the NMA, which was founded in 1895, a time when African-American doctors were not allowed to join the AMS and were barred from most medical schools. Gateway's mission is to "Close the Gap."
There's not always a doctor around to help figure out what's wrong with you—and sometimes, one isn't even necessary. Sometimes, the right technology could help us determine what's going on in our bodies. That's the rationale behind the latest X Prize, known as the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize, which was announced at CES, and which will award a $10 million bounty to the first team that can create "a mobile platform that most accurately diagnoses a set of 15 diseases across 30 [patients] in three days."
In 1819, French physician René Laennec published a description of the cacophony of sick lungs, deciphered with his new invention: the stethoscope. Some 18 months later, doctors in New England read about his discoveries, delivered across the sea and by horseback to their offices in one of the early editions of what would become the venerable New England Journal of Medicine. The journal is marking its 200th birthday with a special website, a series of articles, and a symposium in June meant to highlight how far the field of medicine has come in two centuries.