Death certificates in Illinois will soon reflect what patient safety advocates say has been a secret killer - - staph infections that are resistant to antibiotics. Under the new law, healthcare providers who fill out the certificates will have to include the presence of methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, known as MRSA, and other infections that are resistant to multiple drugs if they contributed to or caused a death. Gov. Pat Quinn is expected to sign the bill into law. Illinois would become the second state after Washington to require the infections be included on death certificates when appropriate. MRSA is a prevalent staph bacteria that can cause skin, ear, nose and throat infections when acquired through close contact - - typically in dorms, jails, day care centers and locker rooms. More serious MRSA infections can occur in hospitalized patients with compromised immune systems following surgeries or other procedures that allow the bacteria to enter the body and cause blood infections and pneumonia.
Pain is more than just a complaint -- it's a public health issue. And the time has come to do something about it. So concludes a new report from the Institute of Medicine, written at the request of the Department of Health and Human Services. The report, mandated by the healthcare overhaul law, estimates that chronic pain costs between $560 billion and $635 billion each year in medical expenses and lost productivity. But, it adds, pain is also personal, affecting each person individually. One-size-fits-all approaches won't address the problem, the report concludes. Chronic pain, from cancer to back pain, is influenced by heredity, stress, depression and other factors, and sometimes lingers after the underlying condition is treated because of changes in the nervous system. So pain can be a disease in and of itself. Yet, the report points out, few medical schools require, or even offer, courses on pain.
With no end in sight for the controversy over health care reform, Macomb County health care providers are engaging with each other in an effort to educate citizens on what reform truly means for them. "There is so much controversy going on now with this act and the repealing that's trying to be attempted and elements of it trying to be picked apart ... it's going to be very interesting to really understand and predict what's going to happen in 2014 when all of this comes about," said Henry Ford Hospital CEO Barbara Rossmann. Rossmann helped break down the 1,000-page health care reform act for various Macomb County business leaders and health care providers who gathered Wednesday at Baker College for the Leadership Macomb seminar. "Whether we agree with the contents of the bill and how it's being orchestrated or not, the intention is the right one," Rossmann said. "It's moving us toward continuity of care managed through primary care physicians."
CT scans reduce the risk of death for heavy smokers with lung cancer by 20% compared to chest X-rays. After a nearly decade-long study, results from the National Lung Screening Trial were published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. The findings made headlines in November 2010 when the National Cancer Institute announced that it had become clear that the group receiving three-dimensional X-ray tests known as low-dose helical CT scans had a significantly higher chance of surviving than those receiving standard chest X-ray tests. It's the first type of screening known to reduce the risk of death from lung cancer, despite a high rate of false positive tests from the scans.
"We have a very diverse group of [health information exchanges] that started in many different ways but are in some ways evolving in the same direction, which is an interesting trend," said Kate Berry, CEO of the National eHealth Collaborative, during a June 28 HIE Leaders Roundtable webinar hosted by the Washington, D.C.-based organization. NeHC brought together 12 HIE leaders of operational HIEs together to talk about critical success factors for establishing an HIE and sustainability. During the discussion, HIE Leaders highlighted the importance of focusing on end users and making exchange easy for providers and vendors. They emphasized the importance of having core competencies in change management and workflow re-engineering. Tom Fritz, CEO of Inland Northwest Health Services in Spokane, WA said his organization provided collaboration for previously competing health organizations in its market. INHS also partnered with physicians, which was "one of the most important things to determine value to our system." Moving forward, Fritz said he expects more services to be developed including data analytics. "We stay away from transaction fees."
Last week, Google confirmed what had been rumored for quite some time: The company is pulling the plug on Google Health, the online personal health record system that they launched in 2008. The service never really took off, and here are five reasons why.