Prosecutors have charged California surgeon Hootan C. Roozrokh, MD, with prescribing excessive and improper doses of drugs to a patient in an attempt to hasten the patient's death to retrieve his organs sooner. At the heart of the case is whether Roozrokh was pursuing organs at any cost or misunderstood a lesser-used harvesting technique known as "donation after cardiac death."
Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano joined other state governors in lobbying for U.S. Congress to place a moratorium on implementing proposed Medicaid regulations that will increase costs for states. The new regulations, issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, would ban the use of federal Medicaid money to pay for doctor training, eliminate some funds for disability programs, and limit Medicaid payments to hospitals and nursing homes run by state governments.
During a debate at Cleveland State University, Democratic Presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton clashed sharply over healthcare. Each accused the other of misrepresenting their approaches to offering coverage for 47 million uninsured Americans.
In a memo sent to reporters, two U.S. senators criticized Forbes magazine's cover story that says big hospitals try to stifle competition from smaller, specialty hospitals and squelch consumer efforts to make assessments of hospital quality more transparent. In the memo, Max Baucus, D-Mont., and Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, say specialty hospitals can be dangerous themselves, since patients in emergency situations must often be transferred to full-service hospitals, in some cases using 911.
New legislation passed by the Senate would provide American Indians with better access to healthcare services. The bill would boost programs at the federally funded Indian Health Service, prompt new construction and modernization of health clinics on reservations, and attempt to recruit more Indians into health professions. It also would increase tribal access to Medicare and Medicaid.
The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center has announced a new management agreement with south Dublin's 183-bed Beacon Hospital--its fifth such arrangement overseas in the past dozen years. The international strategy results from a tightening of margins in the healthcare industry and UPMC's market saturation in southwestern Pennsylvania. Top UPMC officials are also discussing new management contracts with hospitals in Dubai and Cyprus while preparing to announce a healthcare information partnership with a hospital trust in the United Kingdom.
Cerner Corp. is partnering with manufacturer Hillenbrand Industries to feed data collected by "intelligent bed systems" into Cerner's medical records system. Initially, data including a patient's weight, bed-rail position and head elevation will be collected by beds manufactured by Hillenbrand subsidiary Hill-Rom and fed into Cerner's software applications. Later, other data will be collected and included, for instance allowing the bed to communicate with Cerner software when a patient calls for a nurse. The partnership will increase interoperability among medical devices and software used to monitor a patient's progress, and as result improve care, said Hill-Rom representatives.
Microsoft Corp has announced it will test a new way to measure the effectiveness of Internet advertising in a challenge to an industry standard that has helped the likes of Web search leader Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. Microsoft's "Engagement Mapping" departs from a standard that ties sales, leads and traffic to the last ad that a user clicked on online. Instead, it attempts to take into account all the Internet interactions that lead a consumer to buy a product and give advertisers a more accurate assessment of organize online campaigns.
Under a new partnership that sets aside years of rivalry, a group of five community hospitals in the Merrimack Valley region of Massachusetts is launching a campaign to encourage residents to stay local for their medical care. The effort is called the "I-495 Partnership" after the interstate highway that links hospitals from Lowell to Newburyport. The five hospitals all invested cash in a Web site and marketing campaign.
According to a new study, while 84 percent of marketers believe multicultural marketing is "critical to my business," almost 40 percent said they don't know the financial value of multicultural groups to their companies. They also had a variety of opinions on which agencies to hire to reach Hispanics, African-Americans and Asians, according to the Brandiosity study.
