The Westerly Hospital administrators say ongoing staffing changes are driven by reduced patient volume and the need to prepare for constant changes in the delivery of healthcare. "Part of the shift we're seeing is a decrease in inpatient care. I call it the new normal," said Jeanne LaChance, hospital executive vice president/COO. The hospital announced last month that 29 employees would be laid off and 59 others would have their hours reduced. Twenty open positions have been eliminated. The number of layoffs was reduced to 26 when some employees who were facing layoffs found other positions at the hospital. As painful and disruptive as the layoffs are, LaChance said they are necessary to better position the hospital for an ever-changing health care landscape and to more accurately reflect the hospital's labor needs. In addition to lower patient volumes at the hospital, the 125-bed facility - like hospitals across the country - is increasingly focused on keeping people out of the hospital through wellness programs and outpatient care. Effective wellness programs will soon be reimbursed by the federal government as part of health care reform initiatives, hospital officials said.
Hospital administrators say $250 million in state funding cuts over the next two years will be disastrous, with the hospitals in essence paying the state more than they receive for treating Medicaid patients. "It's really a devastating cut for us," said John Schlegelmilch, MD, president of Cheshire Medical Center/Dartmouth-Hitchcock Keene. The hospital is operating at a $900,000 loss so far this year, he said. "If you add on to that a $6 million tax that we don't get back, that shows you how far we will be behind," Schlegelmilch said. Much of the loss from the House-Senate budget passed last week stems from the state's decision not to return to hospitals money they pay in Medicaid enhancement tax (MET). Additionally, $20 million or more results from eliminating state catastrophic payments for the very sick, indirect medical education payments and adjustments to outpatient payments. For Catholic Medical Center, it's a loss of about $12 million a year; for Elliot Hospital, it's about $17 million a year.
As reported on TechCrunch, Google shut down its medical records and health data platform. Since then, there's been a lot of bits spilled offering explanations, but they all missed the most critical item. Money. Or in the language of healthcare: Reimbursement. As much as we'd like to think it isn't the case, the fundamental driver of most (not all) behavior in healthcare is the reimbursement scheme. It's critical to understand the current reimbursement model to understand why Google Health failed to transform the landscape. Today's flawed reimbursement scheme only compensates the healthcare provider for a face to face visit. It's hard to fault the primary care physician who has been put on a hamster wheel of 30-40 appointments per day and can't even give their practice away upon retirement (that was once their retirement plan) for not wanting to deal with their patients sending email or sharing information from their personal health record.
In its ongoing attempt to weaken a key provision of the healthcare reform law -- the one that requires insurers to spend at least 80% of premiums on medical care -- the insurance industry is predicting dire consequences for people enrolled in health savings accounts if lawmakers don't act soon. America's Health Insurance Plans, the insurance lobbying group, warned in a recent report that the rapid growth of HSAs will be hurt unless Congress exempts them from the 80% requirement -- or abolishes the threshold altogether. HSAs are available only to people enrolled in high-deductible plans. They are also exceedingly profitable for insurers.
British researchers have developed what they say is a "cure" for Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease. And all you have to do is starve yourself for eight weeks. Roy Taylor, head of the magnetic resonance imaging unit at Newcastle University in Britain, and his colleagues studied 11 patients who had developed diabetes later in life and who had had it for several years. The patients averaged 220 pounds at the beginning of the study. Each was put on a 600-calorie-per-day diet that included a special diet drink and non-starchy vegetables, such as broccoli, asparagus and cabbage. The diet was followed for eight weeks. Taylor reported Saturday at a San Diego meeting of the American Diabetes Assn. and in the journal Diabetologia that, after one week on the diet, each of the patients' fasting blood sugar, taken before breakfast, had returned to normal. At the end of the eight weeks, the patients had lost an average of 33 pounds and had no signs of diabetes. Three months after returning to a normal diet, seven of them remained free of the disease. Average weight gain in that three months was 6.5 pounds.
A wave of pharmacy robberies is sweeping the United States as desperate addicts and ruthless dealers turn to violence to feed the nation's growing hunger for narcotic painkillers. From Redmond, WA to St. Augustine, FL criminals are holding pharmacists at gunpoint and escaping with thousands of powerfully addictive pills that can sell for as much as $80 apiece on the street. In one of the most shocking crimes yet, a robber walked into a neighborhood drugstore Sunday on New York's Long Island and gunned down the pharmacist, a teenage store clerk and two customers before leaving with a backpack full of pills containing hydrocodone. "It's an epidemic," said Michael Fox, a pharmacist on New York's Staten Island who has been stuck up twice in the last year. "These people are depraved. They'll kill you."