A group of doctors has sued the state of North Carolina in an effort to apply ethics rules on a council that recommends where and when hospitals, clinics, and others can expand. The lawsuit is the latest attack against the North Carolina Certificate of Need law. At issue is the oversight of a 27-member State Health Coordinating Council, which drafts an annual blueprint that determines when and where hospitals can add operating rooms, clinics can buy expensive new diagnostic tools, and doctors' offices can establish one-day surgery centers.
Two key congressional players on healthcare vowed their commitment to moving forward with reform legislation in a letter to President Barack Obama. "We are writing to affirm our continuing commitment to enacting comprehensive healthcare reform this year, and to express our confidence that you will swiftly choose an exceptionally qualified and dedicated alternate nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services to assist in our efforts. As you have emphasized, we must act now," wrote Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus of Montana and Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee Secretary Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts.
Medical facilities will face increased difficulty obtaining credit at favorable terms to fund capital expenditures in 2009 due to the ongoing U.S. economic crisis, according to a study by Millennium Research Group's US Markets for Video and High-Tech Hardware Devices 2009 report. The operating room integration segment will be hit hard by reduced capital equipment funding, according to the report.
During these tough economic times, don't underestimate the difficulty of internal process improvement and cost reduction, says this piece from Sg2. The long-term success or failure of your internal process improvement can, to a large extent, be predicted based on how internal teams are structured, deployed and positioned in the organization, according to the article.
Investors who sought refuge in healthcare have reason to feel less queasy than most in an economy where no industry has been recession-proof. Healthcare stocks posted the second-smallest loss over the past year among 10 sectors tracked by Standard & Poor's, with an average decline of 21.6% through the end of January. But now comes the tricky part: figuring out how much safe-harbor staying power healthcare has left 14 months into the recession.
Patients who got hepatitis from contaminated syringes and medicine vials are joining infection control advocates to warn Americans about the problem. A recent federal study found more than 60,000 people were exposed to hepatitis, and at least 400 people were infected with it in 33 outbreaks linked with blatant safety violations. The report covered the period from 1998 to 2008, and
many of the cases involved reuse of syringes: Health workers likely thought they were being safe by discarding the syringes' used needles and snapping on sterile ones. They were apparently unaware that the plastic barrel part of a syringe can become contaminated, and reusing it even with a fresh needle also can contaminate the medicine vial.