Avera Health in Sioux Falls, SD, is placing telehealth services in its rural hospital emergency rooms. The eEmergency project will help rural hospitals determine which patients can be treated locally and which patients should be transferred to a larger facility.
Baptist Health System has created two programs that will help rural hospitals and physicians in South Texas streamline the transfer of expectant mothers and their babies to San Antonio hospitals for specialized care. Through Maternal Transport, high-risk pregnant women will be transported to Baptist Health System hospitals to take advantage of specialized care from neonatologists with experience with premature babies and babies born with complex medical issues. Through the second program, PediCom, hospitals, urgent care centers, and physicians throughout South Texas will be provided with access to advanced pediatric care.
After rising for more than two decades, childhood obesity appears to have hit a plateau. But it is not clear if the lull is permanent or even if it is the result of public anti-obesity efforts to limit junk food and increase physical activity in schools. Researchers did not give reasons for the leveling off of childhood obesity rates, and one concern is that the lull could represent a natural plateau that would have occurred regardless of public health efforts.
Three high school students in Moffat County, CO, will get first-hand experience in the health profession as part of the Colorado Rural Health Scholars Program. The summer program allows sophomores and juniors to get a glimpse of what is involved in the medical field, and focuses on providing summer health science courses for driven high school students from more rural Colorado areas.
Boston Medical Center has announced Wednesday it has received a $15 million gift that will go to BMC's facilities expansion plan. The plan includes a new ambulatory building, an expanded emergency and trauma center, and increased inpatient capacity through developing a new building or tower. The expansion project will be a multi-year capital expansion project that will create approximately 500,000 square feet of new clinical space to consolidate services, upgrade and expand service, and improve access to care, said BMC representatives.
Kansas City Cancer Center and Shawnee Mission (KS) Medical Center are embarking on a joint venture that will develop an outpatient cancer center at Shawnee Mission's Merriam campus. The center is expected to open in the third quarter of 2009, in a building now under construction. The facility will be the fifth comprehensive treatment center for the Kansas City Cancer Center, and will provide imaging services, outpatient medical oncology and outpatient radiation oncology.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has released a comprehensive plan for advancing health information technology. The plan is designed to serve as a guide to coordinate the federal government's health IT efforts, which seek to achieve nationwide implementation of an interoperable health IT infrastructure throughout both the public and private sector. The ONC-Coordinated Federal Health IT Strategic Plan focuses efforts along two primary goals: patient-focused healthcare, and population health, according to an ONC release.
Individual and family insurance-plan holders with Seattle-based Group Health Cooperative will see their rates increase an average of about 10% beginning in July. Policyholders may have increases of 20% or more, though, depending on their age, health-risk factors and plan, said Group Health representatives. Group Health and several other Washington-based insurance companies blame rising medical-care costs for having to raise rates.
The American Medical Student Association has issued its second annual report card on the conflict-of- interest policies maintained at 150 medical schools, and the University of California-Davis, University of California San Francisco, and UCLA captured three of the seven A grades across the country. Many of the top-scoring schools have recently beefed up their policies, said AMSA representatives. Representatives from UCSF medical school said
the aim at the school was to assure both students and patients that the medical care provided is free of influence or bias. Student groups had a significant impact on the policies at UCSF as well, according to the representatives.
Although 4 million American women give birth annually, almost no one is developing medications for complications of pregnancy, including conditions that threaten the lives of mothers and children, experts say. There are so few effective drugs for pregnancy-related conditions, they add, that in many cases, doctors can save their patients only by delivering babies early.
