The Florida Board of Medicine tossed out charges against a renowned surgeon and professor who mistakenly left a clamp inside a patient.
Juan Asensio-Gonzalez is one of the most respected trauma surgeons in the country, and is director of the Trauma Critical Research and Training program at Jackson Memorial Hospital and a professor at University of Miami.
More than three years into Los Angeles' crackdown on patient dumping downtown, officials have reached settlements with four hospitals and collected millions in payments. But although enforcement has been aggressive, it remains to be decided where these patients should go. While activists decry the practice of hospitals simply dumping patients on skid row without planning where they will go, they admit that finding care for such patients is difficult.
Indigent and under-insured patients are turning to Cook County, IL's Stroger Hospital after not getting fully treated at non-profit hospitals, swamping the cash-strapped public facility while fueling the county's sky-high sales tax, according to the Chicago Tribune. Some of these patients arrive at Stroger's emergency room bearing discharge slips, prescriptions, even Yahoo and Google maps from non-profit hospitals, according to documents.
More than 800 employees at St. Elizabeth's Medical Center in Brighton will join the Service Employees International Union. Nearly three-quarters of those voting approved a plan to join Local 1199 of SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, union leaders said. St. Elizabeth's, the flagship of the Caritas Christi Health Care chain, is the first large Boston hospital to be organized by the SEIU, which in 2007 began a drive to unionize Boston's major hospitals.
Doctors at Massachusetts-based Partners HealthCare may no longer accept gifts and meals from drug and device firms, or travel the country as paid members of company "speakers bureaus," as the hospital and physician network adopts tougher restrictions to counter industry's influence over the drugs and treatments physicians prescribe. Partners, which includes the Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women's hospitals in Boston, also is placing new limits on how physicians interact with company sales representatives and increasing oversight of these relationships.
President Obama announced that his administration will create an electronic record for veterans that will "contain their administrative and medical information from the day they first enlist to the day that they are laid to rest." Obama has made electronic record-keeping a key feature of his healthcare reform effort, but a problem is how the military and VA hospital systems will be able to communicate with each other.