Sutter Roseville Medical Center in Roseville, CA, has opened a new $11.9 million intensive care unit for newborn babies. The neonatal intensive care unit has 16 beds and the most up-to-date equipment to handle emergencies for the sickest of infants, said hospital officials. The facility is located on the lower level of the hospital, and will be able to expand by 14 beds if the hospital desires.
Registered nurses of the UW Medical Center are picketing at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle. Union officials say contract negotiations with the school have stalled. Sticking points in the negotiations include a reduction in rest between nurses' shifts, a 4% pay hike over the next two years that the union says is not competitive, and changes in the amount of time the nurses can take off to care for sick family members.
Kentucky plans to step up efforts to get children from low-income families with no health insurance on a state plan, Gov. Steve Beshear has announced. Beshear said that as many as 90,000 children in Kentucky have no health insurance although as many as 65,000 of those may qualify for the Kentucky Children's Health Insurance Program. Beshear said his administration will make it easier to apply for KCHIP, in part by eliminating the requirement that parents come to a state social service office to apply in person.
According to the Associated Press, Trinity Medical Center in the Dallas suburb of Carrollton, TX, is taking heat because the hospital called authorities when a woman applied for a cafeteria job using a counterfeit Social Security card. The woman was arrested, jailed, and deported.
Now, advocates for illegal immigrants are claiming the hospital went too far. Apparently there is nothing in the law that says an employer is obligated to notify authorities when they suspect or know that an employee or job applicant is in the United States illegally.
The AP reports that immigration attorneys and advocates believe employers like Trinity have become overly cautious about hiring illegal immigrants, to the point that the prospective employers might be bending or breaking the law.
"When people are being prescreened before a decision to hire is being made, then you could have exposure to discrimination charges," Kathleen Walker, a lawyer and former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told AP.
Interesting interpretation. An applicant's crimes should be ignored in the prescreening process—whatever that is—because there is a potential for discrimination.
Trinity spokeswoman Susan Watson offered a different, albeit far more mundane, interpretation. The hospital suspected that at least one crime—identity theft—was being committed. Watson says the hospital felt an obligation to report its suspicions to police.
"Regardless of whether they were an illegal alien, legal immigrant or an American citizen, it still wouldn't have mattered. They still would have been reported," she told AP.
Imagine that. A hospital is taking heat for reporting a crime. The nerve!
This criticism comes at a time when the nation's healthcare system is getting blasted—and rightly so—by consumer advocates and the media for its failure to secure patients' records against illicit snooping and identity theft. In Carrollton, we have a job applicant caught using a bogus Social Security card and Trinity is rapped for reporting her. Let's imagine what would have happened if Trinity had hired an illegal immigrant, who then poached patients' records and perpetrated identity theft. How would that play in the media? How many lawsuits would that lapse have created?
The charge of discrimination lodged against a hospital for reporting a crime committed by an illegal immigrant is particularly galling when you consider that illegal immigrants have no better friend in this nation. Our hospitals are the often-uncompensated healthcare provider of first and last resort for many of the estimated 10 to 13 million illegal immigrants living in the United States. In Texas alone, the state's comptroller estimates illegal immigrants cost hospitals $1.3 billion in 2006, with most of those costs eaten by hospitals.
This is not a rap on illegal immigrants; the vast majority are hardworking and decent people who are just trying to provide for their families.
But it does illustrate the unique and vulnerable position that hospitals find themselves in when dealing with illegal immigrants. We have the millions of illegal immigrants using and stressing healthcare services in the country. We have a federal government that is doing little if anything to address this free for all. We have advocacy groups and the media on all sides of the argument waiting to pounce on any perceived error.
Report a crime: Busted! Don't report a crime: Busted! Take your pick.
It's a problem that hospitals didn't create, didn't ask for, and have little or no influence over. But it's still their problem.
John Commins is the human resources and community and rural hospitals editor withHealthLeadersMedia. He can be reached at jcommins@healthleadersmedia.com.
Once upon a time a hospital created an advertising campaign that told its story through the success stories of its doctors and patients. The moral of that story? Increased community awareness is possible with a unique creative strategy.
According to Children's Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota in Minneapolis, everyone involved with the facility had a story to share of an experience they had with a patient. Using that as motivation, Children's decided to do a campaign that would showcase those stories, using them as a powerful way to deliver a message of care.
"We wanted to be able to do two things," says Trudy Marshall, director of marketing and communications for Children's. "We wanted to tell the story of how we take care of kids but also wanted to highlight what we do for kids."
The marketing team chose two patient stories to highlight in the ads. One features a family with twins who were born prematurely and spent 113 days in the neonatal intensive care unit. The other features a family whose child was treated for a rare form of cancer.
"Our neonatology outcomes are among the very highest in the nation," says Marshall. "We wanted to bring that to life through telling an individual story-to show quality outcomes."
What makes the ads unique, however, is the creative execution from which the story is told.
TV was chosen as the primary medium and the ads are a mix of cartoon whimsy and real-life. Each spot shows the Children's story in the form of an actual story book that opens to reveal the patient's success story moving within it. The story is narrated by the professional who cared for the child, and at the end, a call-to-action drives viewers to Children's Web site to share a Children's story of their own.
The stories that are shared via the Web site are then posted in an online community of positive experiences and successes which, in turn, is positive for the facility as it becomes positive user generated public relations messaging.
Marshall says the outcomes have been great.
"The feedback we've received shows that the campaign has made people think about the stories they have. People who have seen it will say, 'boy do I have a story for you.' It's amazing how many stories we do hear."
Kandace McLaughlin is an editor with HealthLeaders magazine. Send her Campaign Spotlight ideas at kmclaughlin@healthleadersmedia.com If you are a marketer submitting a campaign on behalf of your facility or client, please ensure you have permission before doing so.
The two major presidential candidates' healthcare proposals are quite different, but there is agreement on one issue—they both oppose individual mandates.
Sen. Barack Obama's health plan includes mandatory coverage for children, expanding public programs, mandating large employers offer insurance, and stopping health plans from denying coverage to those with preexisting conditions or charging them substantially higher premiums.
Sen. John McCain bases most of his healthcare policy on market forces and individual insurance as he would offer a tax credit to help Americans pay for healthcare. He also supports health savings accounts, allowing interstate insurance purchases, and less comprehensive health insurance options (known as "mandate lite" policies).
The individual mandate idea ended nationally the day Sen. Hillary Clinton dropped out of the Democratic race for president. The mandate was a major plank in Clinton's healthcare reform proposal, and is a key reason why the commonwealth of Massachusetts has the lowest percentage of uninsured residents—yet there simply isn't widespread support for the idea.
Jon Kingsdale, executive director of the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority in Boston, which oversees the landmark reform program, says other states and federal legislators are waiting to see what happens in Massachusetts before deciding on an individual mandate.
"The jury is not completely in on [individual mandates]. I think that no matter what your initial thinking is or perspective is on the individual mandate, you would want to see how it played out in Massachusetts," he says.
Kingsdale says the individual mandate allows the state to enroll more residents and encourages people who would not normally sign up for health insurance (young and healthy) to enroll in employer-based insurance. Bringing the younger and healthier residents into the care pool, employers and individual health insurance plans would have more funds to help fund care for the sick.
Kingsdale says the latest figures from March 31 show that about 5% of Massachusetts residents are uninsured. Out of the 439,000 residents who gained insurance since the reforms took effect, Kingsdale says nearly half of them are covered under private insurance. Many of those 191,000 people would not have insurance if not for the mandate, he says.
"I think it goes back to the mandate. I think clearly the folks look at the offer of insurance from their employer very different. And because the mandate and the reforms have made direct purchase insurance far more affordable, we have seen a big increase, almost a doubling, in the number of people buying directly out of their own pocket in the last year," says Kingsdale.
Despite Kingsdale's pronouncement, there are still many who believe individual mandates aren't the way to go. The opponents are groups not usually known as allies. The Cato Institute in an April 2006 policy analysis called "Individual Mandates for Health Insurance: Slippery Slope to National Health Care" wrote an individual mandate would create a "costly and complex bureaucratic system of tracking, penalties, and subsidies" leading to an unenforceable mandate.
The think tank added mandates would lead to more regulation and interference of healthcare choices, which would lead to a path to a "government-run" healthcare system. On the other end of the political spectrum is OneCareNow.org, a California advocacy group promoting a single-payer system. The group wrote on its Web site that individual mandates are "a cruel method for pretending that health insurance is on the way for everyone while, in fact, bigger profits are on the way for insurance companies."
Whether individual mandates are the answer is still in question. It won't be part of the national debate during the presidential campaign. Instead, the debate will focus on whether the U.S. wants more government intervention or consumerism. We may have to wait another four years before the individual mandate makes another appearance on the national stage.
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A Houston doctor has been convicted of conspiring to defraud Medicare of nearly $30 million. According to prosecutors, Dr. Michael D. Kim fraudulently certified physically fit beneficiaries in Texas and Louisiana to receive motorized wheelchairs. They say the false certificates scammed of more than $10 million.
In an effort to combat two of its biggest problems—health insurance costs and obesity—Alabama officials are putting into motion a plan to tax the state's overweight employees as a way to recoup insurance costs. Starting in 2010, employees will be charged $25 a month for health insurance.
Here's a tagline for your next ad: "Our hospital kills fewer patients than the other guys!" No wait—that doesn't sound quite right. What if you flip it around to accentuate the positive? You could try something along the lines of "More patients survive when they are treated at our hospital." But that's not exactly a compelling message, either.
On August 20, CMS released mortality rates for every hospital in the country based on patients who died within 30 days of being admitted from a heart attack, heart failure, or pneumonia. The "death rates" as some in the media are calling them, are available online at the Hospital Compare site.
And it's super easy to look up the information. Consumers type in their ZIP code, define their search parameters by distance in miles, check off up to three hospitals, and click a button to compare them.
The effort was well-publicized in the widely-read USA Today newspaper, which also listed the best- and worst-scoring hospitals in the U.S. Although the Hospital Compare site can be hard to navigate, the newspaper's special package makes it easy to find the information. And understanding the results is easy, too.
I've criticized CMS in the past for making their data inscrutable, but it looks like they're learning their lesson on that score—the results, which compare the selected hospitals to each other and to the national average, are presented in an easy-to-understand graph. The explanation of the data is also fairly straightforward, although it's written at roughly a tenth-grade reading level, which is a little on the high side.
Of the handful of hospitals that I looked at, none had a mortality rate above the national average. That's pretty good news for those hospitals, right? Something to celebrate?
Well, if you can figure out a way to do that without mentioning death, I'd sure like to hear about it.
CMS "discourages" hospitals from using information from the Hospital Compare site in marketing efforts. But that's not going to stop hospitals from doing so: Experts I've talked to say CMS is unlikely to enforce the unofficial rule and, even if they do call a hospital on it, the most they'll do is send a stern letter.
Effectively, there's nothing stopping hospitals with good mortality rates from putting the results in a print, radio, outdoor, or TV ad.
Well, nothing other than common sense, that is.
It's one thing to take risks in your marketing efforts, strive to make an impact, and cut through the clutter. I'm all for that. And I think hospitals should be open and transparent about their patient safety, patient satisfaction, and quality statistics. It's not a bad idea to put the information or at least a link to the Hospital Compare site on your own Web site. After all, the information is already out there.
But a billboard or a TV spot touting your low mortality rates? Call me a traditionalist, but that just doesn't seem right to me. I just can't think of any good way to talk about death in a hospital ad.
Gienna Shaw is an editor with HealthLeaders magazine. She can be reached at gshaw@healthleadersmedia.com.
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