U.S. health insurer WellPoint Inc and computer giant IBM agreed to commercially use IBM's Watson technology that could help physicians identify best treatment options.
The new system being developed will have the ability to look at massive amounts of medical literature and arrive at best treatment solutions, the companies said in a statement.
As the WSJ reports, the American Academy of Family Physicians wants Medicare to change the makeup of a committee that helps set physician-payment levels, including adding more primary-care representatives to the group. And it plans to propose different ways for calculating Medicare reimbursement for primary-care services, which it argues are too low compared to payments for specialist services.
Meantime, a study just published in Health Affairs confirms the primary-care/specialist discrepancy, but notes U.S. physicians in general are paid more per service compared to their counterparts in Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the United Kingdom. The differential was particularly stark for hip replacements, especially on the private-payer side of things.
Nearly 3,000 people died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. But the twin towers' collapse and their smoldering ruins also exposed thousands of rescuers, firefighters and cleanup crews to toxic ash and smoke. Ten years later, medical researchers say many of these people are suffering higher-than-normal rates of serious disease and psychological problems.
There is no cure for Alzheimer's, but researchers, many of whom launch clinical trials in South Florida, are optimistic as the genetics, the pathology and the intricacies of Alzheimer's become better known. An estimated 450,000 Floridians have Alzheimer's disease, a number that is expected to grow by another 135,000 or so by 2025, according to the Alzheimer's Association, a national group that focuses on Alzheimer's research. Florida ranks second only to California in Alzheimer's patients.
"We want to map the genetic landscape of Alzheimer's so we can understand the landscape," said Dr. Margaret Pericak-Vance, director of the John P. Hussman Institute for Human Genomics at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and recipient of this year's lifetime achievement award by the Alzheimer's Association.
Care transitions — those times when someone enters a hospital, transfers from one department to another, gets discharged to a rehabilitation center or goes home — are risky times. Health care professionals have long known that these handoffs provide prime opportunities for mistakes, most often because of communication lapses.
One unnervingly common error for hospitalized patients was documented by a very large Canadian study of older adults recently published in The Journal of the American Medical Association: essential medications inadvertently get stopped.
A medical privacy breach led to the public posting on a commercial Web site of data for 20,000 emergency room patients at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., including names and diagnosis codes, the hospital has confirmed. The information stayed online for nearly a year.
Since discovering the breach last month, the hospital has been investigating how a detailed spreadsheet made its way from one of its vendors, a billing contractor identified as Multi-Specialty Collection Services, to a Web site called Student of Fortune, which allows students to solicit paid assistance with their schoolwork.