Middlesex Hospital in Middletown, CT, has officially opened its new $31 million emergency department. The new ED has nearly twice the number of beds as before and three times the total space. There's also an array of new technology to streamline patient care, such as bedside registration systems, portable ultrasound equipment, laptops in every room for instant medical histories, and large, high-resolution screens to display digital X-rays. In addition, a new system allows doctors to type medicine and treatment orders directly into the computer.
The University of Connecticut Health Center needs a modern teaching hospital to replace the outdated John Dempsey Hospital on its Farmington campus if it is to survive, according to a report from the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering. The Academy is recommending that Dempsey should be closed, and UConn should collaborate with one or more of the hospitals that now compete for patients to create a new medical complex on the health center grounds. The study was commissioned by the state legislature after UConn officials proposed building a new 352-bed, state-run hospital in Farmington to replace the John Dempsey.
Elmhurst (IL) Memorial Healthcare can proceed on a $450 million medical campus after the Elmhurst City Council agreed to turn over two unused streets to the hospital. Construction is scheduled to be completed by 2011 and when it opens, the new hospital will replace the current Elmhurst Memorial in the city.
In a bid to save costs and stem a rising tide of medical waste, hospitals are recycling a growing number of medical devices labeled as single-use. The practice, which involves shipping devices to reprocessing facilities to be cleaned, sterilized and tested for reuse, has raised concerns about safety. Medical device makers say their single-use products pose a higher risk of failure and harm when recycled.
As the government increases the private sector's role in delivering Medicare and Medicaid, new kinds of fraud are cropping up. Managed-care fraudsters profit by, among other means, shortchanging patients or physicians to cut costs while collecting fees from the government. They might refuse to enroll unhealthy people, skimp on paying doctors or deny patients care. As a result of the trend, regulators are ramping up scrutiny of the managed-care industry.
As thousands of medical students await word on residency programs, two specialties that are among the most competitive include dermatology and plastic surgery. The trend is part of a migration of a top tier of American medical students from branches of healthcare that manage major diseases toward specialties that improve the life of patients--and the lives of physicians, with better pay, more autonomy and more-controllable hours.
A $15.5 million grant from the Federal Communications Commission to the Center for Telehealth and Cybermedicine Research at the University of New Mexico will be used to design, build, operate and evaluate a broadband network largely serving rural areas that typically lack such technology. The grid of telehealth networks will support rural systems and connections to more than 500 sites, primarily in New Mexico and Arizona. Several Indian Health Service sites in Colorado, California, Nevada, Texas and Utah will also be served by the network.
As a developing nation, India has high hopes for its healthcare industry and the potential for medical travel. Overall, the government supports its growing private healthcare sector. However, the Medical Council of India maintains regulations barring physician and hospital advertising that--when taken at face value--are antiquated and anti-business.
For the past decade, as private healthcare organizations became more common in the region, the medical council has not enforced aspects of the Code of Medical Ethics that deem most forms of hospital and physician advertising as "unethical."
More recently, the Karnataka Medical Council warned practitioners of its position against advertising, as stated in the Code of Medical Ethics. KMC was moved to action because it had observed many hospitals advertising on a mass scale, including newspaper ads and billboards, the council's president told The Hindu newspaper.
In an e-mail conversation, Dharminder Nagar, MD, CEO of Paras Hospital, in Gurgaon, India, tells me that healthcare advertising in the nation is a fairly new phenomenon that has come about with the emergence of corporate, for-profit hospitals.
"As a hospital CEO, I believe the modern hospital marketing practices hold great value today and the need to implement these in the future will continue to grow," says Nagar. "Healthcare in India is at the cusp of explosive growth, and at the same time competition is bound to increase tremendously. Marketing of hospital services and differentiating the services for the public will become an important factor in attracting patients."
Some Indian hospitals carry on advertising their providers and services under the assumption that the medical council will continue turning a blind eye. Others don't wish to take the risk and instead seek alternative, legal methods. Nagar points out that holding public health programs and seminars that are promoted in local newspapers is a perfectly legal and effective way to promote Paras Hospital's services. "I believe that best international practices in hospital marketing will help us tremendously, but these need to be modified to suit the local legal and cultural context," he says.
Perhaps it's my cultural bias as a Westerner, but I still can't shake the feeling that this country's Code of Medical Ethics in its current form is too rigid and onerous. As an emerging industry in a developing country, India's private hospitals face many obstacles, from adopting the latest technology and medical procedures to attracting and maintaining clinical staff.
To support the growth of this business sector, hospital CEOs should be urged to embrace modern business practices that include promoting their services to the public, so long as the content of these messages is ethical and factual. Instead, the medical council retains a code that is anti-business and perhaps impossible to enforce. This invites noncompliance and, as a byproduct, punishes those institutions that abide by the regulation.
Moreover, the spread of talent and technology is not enough to globalize the business of healthcare. Governments worldwide need to support the industry, and healthcare institutions need to promote best practices in health system administration. The end result will be better choice of healthcare providers as well as better access to state-of-the-art healthcare.
As for those best-practices in healthcare marketing, I wrote about what some of the top U.S. health systems are doing in HealthLeaders magazine last year. That was an article I took pleasure in writing because I consider myself something of a life-long student of communication. It troubles me when others hold views that marketing and advertising are by their very nature unethical.
No, advertising and marketing can both support the business of healthcare and provide the pubic with tools to make informed decisions. There's nothing unethical about that.
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Rick Johnson is senior online editor of HealthLeaders Media. He may be reached at rjohnson@healthleadersmedia.com. View Rick Johnson's profile
Nurses at University of California-Davis Medical Center will vote on a tentative contract agreement reached by the California Nurses Association and the University of California. The contract would be in effect until September 2010 and would include a limit on mandatory shift rotations and across-the-board salary increases this year of 6 percent at the medical centers and up to 8 percent at student health centers.
Electronic medical-records systems developer Misys Healthcare Systems will merge Chicago-based rival Allscripts. The merger will create a company that will quickly become a leader in the medical software field, said Misys CEO Mike Lawrie. The combined company will have about 150,000 U.S. physicians and 700 hospitals as customers.
