Cleveland’s MetroHealth System has spent more than $7 million during the past 12 months with the consulting company that formerly employed its CEO and CFO. Booz & Co. faced no competition for the MetroHealth jobs. The contracts were not put up for bid. At a public audit committee meeting this week, MetroHealth System board members asked the hospital's internal auditors to review the process of how the taxpayer-supported hospital approves professional contracts for architects, engineers and consultants. In many cases there is no formal bidding process, said John Moss, one of the newest members of the hospital's board. Members approve contracts based on just “a couple of paragraphs or sentences. In the past 14 months, I’ve voted on millions of dollars in no-bid contracts,” said Moss. “This makes me very uncomfortable.” Booz, which isn’t ranked as a top health-care advisory firm by the consulting industry, was awarded a total of nine contracts for work that included finding ways to improve operations at MetroHealth's community health centers.
Kindness seems to be contagious at Loyola University Medical Center. Five of the Maywood hospital's employees have donated kidneys to complete strangers since last year, and two others were good Samaritan kidney donors to casual acquaintances. The altruistic donors nicknamed "The Seven Sisters of Loyola" appear to have set a world record for the most employees of a single company donating kidneys to non-relatives, hospital officials said Wednesday. Their generosity also helped launch Loyola's "Pay it Forward" kidney donation program, which uses the non-profit National Kidney Registry to try to turn a single altruistic donation into a "chain" of multiple kidney transplants.
U.S. District Judge Phillip Simon rejected a plea agreement for surgeon Mark Weinberger, saying the insurance fraud totaling $318,000 likely does not encompass the full scope of Weinberger’s alleged crimes. Simon said he would not consider the numerous letters from outraged patients because Weinberger was charged only with defrauding insurance companies by allegedly billing them for work he never did. “That is for a civil court to decide, whether the defendant was a good doctor or a not-so-good doctor. This is a straightforward insurance fraud case,” Simon said. The case is now set for trial unless Weinberger's court-appointed attorneys are able to negotiate a new deal with prosecutors. The ruling by Simon was another patch of turbulence in Weinberger's bizarre fall from grace.
The U.S. Supreme Court appeared split on Tuesday as it considered a case testing state limits on data mining. At issue is whether states can bar the buying, selling and profiling of a doctor's prescription records without the physician's consent. Government regulations require pharmacies to keep records of all doctors' prescriptions. In most states, pharmacies can and do sell these records to data mining companies -- companies that in turn sell the information to drugmakers for use in targeted sales pitches to doctors. When doctors in Vermont found out their prescription records were being sold this way, they went to the state Legislature, and the state enacted a law barring the practice. The data miners and the pharmaceutical industry challenged the law in court. They contend it is unconstitutional because it makes it more difficult for drugmakers to identify doctors who would be good prospects for sales. But Vermont contends the law constitutionally allows doctors to decide for themselves whether information about their prescription habits can be sold to data miners.
The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health said Tuesday that it will take disciplinary action against its physicians who wrote doctor excuse notes for protesters at the state Capitol during rallies in February. The doctors face discipline ranging from a written reprimand to loss of pay and leadership position, the medical school said in a statement. The medical school, however, would not say how many doctors were facing discipline. The school said it reviewed 22 physicians whose names were provided from a variety of sources as having offered medical excuse notes to protesters. Its investigation found that several of those said to have provided excuse notes had not done so. It said in the statement that it would not release the names of those involved and the actions taken, citing state law governing the confidentiality of public employee records. The UW School of Medicine and Public Health's investigation is separate from a probe being conducted by the state Department of Regulation and Licensing and the Medical Examining Board into the doctor excuse notes.
A 30-year-old man from Indiana who lost much of his face after a terrible car accident received a full face transplant at Brigham and Women's Hospital last week. Surgeons, who announced the surgery Tuesday, said the 30-person transplant team worked for more than 14 hours to replace the “full facial area” of Mitch Hunter, including his “nose, eyelids, lips, muscles of facial animation and the nerves that power them and provide sensation.” Hunter suffered a severe shock from a high voltage electrical wire following a car accident in 2001. It is the third face transplant performed at the Brigham, and the fourth in the country. In the Brigham's previous two face transplants, the patients also suffered from high-voltage electrical burns.