The high-stakes, seven-year battle to build the first hospital in Fort Mill, SC, could be nearing an end. Tenet Healthcare Corp., Novant Health and Carolinas HealthCare System plan to file the last required paperwork today in their bids to be the main healthcare provider in northern York County. S.C. regulators will decide by early September who gets to build. Appeals could prolong the fight. It's a dispute that's been unusually long, public - and strategic. Tenet, which runs Piedmont Medical Center in Rock Hill and is the only for-profit entity among the three, declares it will lose millions if one of the Charlotte titans wins. Meanwhile, continued growth is key for rivals CHS, which runs Carolinas Medical Center, and Novant, which owns Presbyterian Healthcare.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services released a report showing that 10 states lack sufficient authority under current law to review and reject excessive health insurance rate increases as required under the Affordable Care Act. Beginning Sept. 1 CMS will begin review of all rate hikes in excess of 10% for these states. The Department of Health and Human Services announced the new regulation—which covers only individual and small group policies—in May and set the threshold for review at 10% and will be in effect for one year. In 2012 states will be expected to set their own rate increase thresholds as they see fit based on market conditions in each state. "Effective rate review works—it does so by protecting consumers from unreasonable rate increases and bringing needed transparency to the marketplace," said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in May when the regulation was announced. "During the past year we have worked closely with states to strengthen their ability to review, revise or reject unreasonable rate hikes. This final rule helps build on that partnership to protect consumers."
David Sellers, MD, ends his shifts when most physicians have their morning coffee. A nocturnist at Middle Tennessee Medical Center in Murfreesboro, he's on the hospital floor all night, ready to handle patient problems that go beyond the expertise of a nurse. Nights and weekends can be dangerous times for patients, according to multiple studies. The most recent—one that tracked the outcomes of 30 million patients over a five-year period—showed that patients admitted to hospitals on weekends have a 10% higher death rate. Sellers works every night of the week, including weekends. "This has been the most exciting thing I've done in medicine just because I'm able to focus on very sick patients, and I feel like I get them better and get them on their way out of the hospital, which is fulfilling," he said. Hospitals are increasingly counting on nocturnists to help them improve patient safety and response times. John Nelson, MD, a partner with Nelson Flores Hospital Medicine Consultants, coined the term nocturnist. By his estimate, there are probably 1,000 to 1,500 nocturnists working now compared with more than 100 a decade ago.
In the wake of the failure of medical and law-enforcement officials to stop pediatrician Earl B. Bradley from sexually abusing girls he treated, lawmakers last year enacted a slew of laws aimed at cracking down on incompetent doctors and those who fail to report wrongdoing. Many wondered whether those reforms would make a difference. The early answer is that disciplinary actions against Delaware doctors have increased dramatically since the first revelations in January 2010 that Bradley had raped or molested more than 100 child patients and that complaints over a 15-year period about his inappropriate touching of girls never led to discipline or his arrest.
Doctors have replaced the cancer-stricken windpipe of a patient with an organ made in a lab, a landmark achievement for regenerative medicine. The patient no longer has cancer and is expected to have a normal life expectancy, doctors said. "He was condemned to die," said Paolo Macchiarini, a professor of regenerative surgery who carried out the procedure at Sweden's Karolinska University Hospital. "We now plan to discharge him [Friday]."The transplantation of an entirely synthetic and permanent windpipe had never been successfully done before the June 9 procedure. The researchers haven't yet published the details in a scientific journal.The patient's speedy recovery marks another milestone in the quest to make fresh body parts for transplantation or to treat disease. More immediately, it offers a possible treatment option for thousands of patients who suffer from tracheal cancer or other dangerous conditions affecting the windpipe.
Ontario hospitals are bracing for an influx of a highly contagious superbug that has already claimed the lives of at least 18 elderly patients in the province. One in 14 hospitals in Ontario were dealing with an outbreak of Clostridium difficile. commonly known as C. difficile, according to statistics collected by the Ministry of Health for the month of May. While some have since been taken off the list, several others have been hit with their own outbreaks in recent weeks. Health-care practitioners say it is not just the spike in cases that is a concern. They are also worried about the virulence of the strain, the same one that killed 2,000 people in Quebec a few years ago and that Australia is now struggling to contain. While officials scramble to contain the outbreaks in Ontario, an infectious-bacteria expert is warning that hospitals are going about tackling the problem the wrong way.