You should be aghast at how free and easy Prime Healthcare Services and two executives at Prime-owned Shasta Regional Medical Center have been with the medical chart of a patient named Darlene Courtois. They showed the entire chart to an editor of her hometown newspaper, and Prime's corporate office divulged some of her medical examination results to me (though I didn't ask for them). They didn't have her permission for those disclosures, her daughter says.
St. John's Hospital in Joplin, Missouri is preparing for several major projects in the coming months. The old structure, destroyed by the May 22 tornado, will be demolished and a new one built in 2012. Groundbreaking at the new location is planned for the end of this month.
A panel appointed by Gov. Rick Scott, who once headed the nation's largest for-profit hospital chain, told him on Tuesday that it could not determine whether Florida's public hospitals provide better or worse care than private ones. A study commissioned by the seven-member Commission on Review of Taxpayer Funded Hospital Districts said it was difficult to compare the quality of care at various types of hospitals because they are very diverse and have complex business models. The commission noted a third of Florida's publicly owned hospitals are in rural areas that have too few patients to generate data comparable to urban hospitals.
Some of the nation's top medical schools cracked down on professors who give paid promotional talks for drugmakers last year, and the firms themselves cut back on such spending in the wake of mounting scrutiny. Last year began with the University of Colorado Denver and its affiliated teaching hospitals launching an overhaul of conflict-of-interest policies after ProPublica found that more than a dozen of its faculty members had given paid promotional talks.
Sent back to Mexico by the Chicago-area medical center that had treated his crippling injury, the young quadriplegic languished for more than a year in a small-town hospital ill-equipped to handle his needs. Quelino Ojeda Jimenez, who needed a ventilator to breathe, suffered two episodes of cardiac arrest in that facility as well as developing bedsores and a septic infection, officials said. On Sunday, just 30 minutes into the new year, Ojeda died at age 21, said Jeromino Ramirez Luis, director of the General Hospital of Juchitan in Mexico, which took over his care from the smaller facility last month.
Hundreds of patients have been languishing for months or even years in New York City hospitals, despite being well enough to be sent home or to nursing centers for less-expensive care, because they are illegal immigrants or lack sufficient insurance or appropriate housing. As a result, hospitals are absorbing the bill for millions of dollars in unreimbursed expenses annually while the patients, trapped in bureaucratic limbo, are sometimes deprived of services that could be provided elsewhere at a small fraction of the cost.