Des Moines, IA-area clinics that provide free or discounted care are seeing extra business, apparently because of the slumping economy. The facilties that offer discounted treatment are feeling the pressure: At Broadlawns Medical Center, Polk County, IA's public hospital, the number of uninsured patients rose 12%, to 45,798, in the six months ending Feb. 28, compared with the same period a year earlier. At Primary Health Care, a federally subsidized agency that runs clinics in Des Moines and Marshalltown, the number of uninsured patients rose from 13,259 in 2007 to 14,773 in 2008, and agency leaders say the increases appear to be continuing.
Officials at St. Francis Hospital and Health Centers are eyeing the nation's economic situation as they put the brakes on further work on a multimillion-dollar construction project in Indianapolis. A $265 million, inpatient tower and emergency department expansion will be put on hold this summer if the economy doesn't improve, officials said.
After more than a decade of expansion, the Medical College of Wisconsin is grappling with smaller operating margins, a less profitable patient mix and excess research capacity at the school and its hospital partners. As a result, the school will cut its budget by 5% for the fiscal year beginning July 1, and layoffs are possible, college spokesman Richard Katschke confirmed. Medical schools across the country are experiencing similar problems, some of which are severe.
The best-case scenario for the government's plans to spend $19 billion on computerized medical records is seamless communication among doctors and patients, and far fewer mistakes. And the worst-case: $19 billion goes down the drain. The medical industry is hoping for the first outcome, even while some fear the second, as the Health and Human Services Department tries to get hundreds of thousands of doctors to quit using paper files and join the digital age.
The Sg2 orthopedics team surveyed 238 orthopedic surgeons on this question and a wide range of other issues, including the greatest professional pressures they face, current and planned practice expansion initiatives, physician-hospital relationships and practice marketing and promotion activities. Respondents represented a variety of practice sizes, structures and locations.
Economic concerns related to reimbursement from Medicare and private payers, overhead and expense management are by far these surgeons' top concerns.
The personal information of more than 200,000 visitors to Miami-based Jackson Memorial Hospital over an 11-month period was on a hard drive that has been stolen, the hospital announced. Copies of the drivers' licenses of visitors from May 2007 through March 2008 were on a work station hard drive that vanished from a data center. Hospital officials recommended that visitors during that period place a fraud alert with a credit bureau. No Social Security numbers or financial information was on the missing hard drive, said Dennis Proul, the hospital's chief information officer.