Robin Lumley, childless, overweight and unmarried at 46, arrived at an emergency room in University Community Hospital in Carrollwood (FL) 2 1/2 years ago complaining of terrible abdominal pain. A short while later, the medical staff at the hospital found that she had delivered a 6-pound baby girl into the toilet although Lumley did not know she was pregnant. Now the hospital is being sued, and plaintiffs contend that baby Brianna Rose Lumley went into respiratory arrest and suffered brain damage due to treatment providers' negligence.
Six healthcare systems in the Milwaukee area are each putting in the building blocks needed for electronic health records, and that work could accelerate in the next few years. So far, they have spent more than $200 million on the effort, and they could spend hundreds of millions more to complete and refine their systems. Aurora Health Care alone estimates it has spent $150 million in the past decade on EHR projects.
A new construction project at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin shows that the advances in medicine also apply to buildings. Children's Hospital’s $165.9 million tower, its third major expansion since 1988, initially will add 58 beds. But the tower includes two floors of space for an additional 72 beds when needed. The size and design of the patients' rooms in the hospital’s new tower are just one example of the advances: The rooms, designed for one patient and family, will be larger than those in the original hospital built 20 years ago.
Acting Medicare chief Kerry Weems has announced new efforts to combat fraud in seven states. Among the changes are more stringent background checks of equipment suppliers, unannounced visits to businesses, and more scrutiny of billing records submitted by doctors. Investigators also will conduct more interviews with beneficiaries to see whether they receive their supplies, and if they qualify for such benefits. The new measures come after several congressional reports have described questionable Medicare payments to medical providers across the country.
Economic stress is taking its toll on U.S. residents' emotional and physical health, new survey data show. A survey conducted by the American Psychological Association found that more than half of Americans report irritability or anger, fatigue and sleeplessness, and almost half say they self-medicate by overeating or indulging in unhealthy foods. Money and the economy topped the list of stressors for at least 80% of those surveyed.
In a survey, physicians were presented with two scenarios: In one, a child receives an overdose of insulin and is admitted to the intensive care unit, and in the other, a doctor overlooks a lab test and the child is hospitalized for a serious infection. The insulin overdose would be more apparent to the child’s family, and that may partly explain why 75% of pediatricians said they would definitely report the insulin overdose to the child's family, but only 33% said they’d definitely report the overlooked lab test. The range of responses about whether and how to report such errors to patients is reflective of a medical culture that is only slowly moving toward transparency, and of an abiding fear of lawsuits among doctors, say the study's authors.
American business is typically a reliable Republican cheerleader, but it is lukewarm about Senator John McCain's proposal to overhaul the healthcare system by revamping the tax treatment of health benefits, officials with leading trade groups say. The officials predicted in recent interviews that the McCain plan, which eliminates the exclusion of health benefits from income taxes, would accelerate the erosion of employer-sponsored health insurance and do little to reduce the number of uninsured from 45 million.
Thousands of newly insured Massachusetts residents are still relying on emergency rooms for routine medical care. Under a 2006 law, nearly every state resident is required to have health insurance, and the law's framers hoped it would ease overuse of ERs as the newly insured went instead to primary care doctors for non-urgent health needs. But a sizable number of patients who obtained state-subsidized insurance have continued to use the ER at a rate 14% higher than Massachusetts residents overall, according to records.
Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell is making an 11th-hour push to deliver on his promise to expand healthcare coverage for the uninsured. Seeking a compromise with Senate Republicans opposed to spending and taxing increases, Rendell has scaled back his original 2007 proposal, and dropped a request for a tobacco tax to help pay for it. The latest proposal would add 250,000 people to the state insurance program by 2012, but they would have more limited benefits than Rendell envisioned. The deal also would extend state subsidies to cover medical malpractice insurance for doctors.
Georgia's top health agency plans to charge health insurers millions of dollars in extra fees to help pay for the state's Medicaid and PeachCare for Kids programs. But the insurance companies are fighting back, saying the fees will drive up rates for people with private insurance and possibly price some people out of their coverage plans.
