Lawmakers are stalling in providing a plan to offer health care coverage for the estimated 790,000 uninsured people in Colorado. Although it's a top priority for the legislature this session, neither Republicans nor Democrats seem ready to hit taxpayers up for a major health care reform package on the November ballot. At the end of this month, the legislature will hear five proposals--from requiring Coloradans to buy health insurance or pay a tax penalty, to creating a single nonprofit insurance program for all residents. Covering children alone would cost an extra $200 million per year, according to one legislative estimate.
One patient's struggle to receive care for his severed hand reflects the flaws in the on-call system in California. Patient advocates are arguing for hospitals to electronically list the gastroenterologists, heart surgeons and other specialists guaranteed to be ready for emergency calls. Then paramedics could avoid taking patients to hospitals that can't promptly care for them.
San Diego County hospitals performing heart bypass surgery met state expectations in 2005, with risk-adjusted death rates close to California's average of 3.08 percent. But the number of bypasses has declined rapidly, according to an annual report released yesterday by the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development. Surgeons performed fewer than 17,000 heart bypass surgeries at California hospitals in 2006--down 43 percent from 1997. In contrast, the number of angioplasty procedures, including insertion of tiny scaffolds called stents into arteries, exceeded 60,000 that year.
In this provacative opinion piece, Robert Goldberg, vice president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, argues that Medicare and CMS cutbacks in reimbursements for crucial cancer fighting drugs could lead to a serious loss of lives. "Fewer drugs. Fewer seniors," he writes. "Maybe that should be Medicare's slogan for the future."
Medicare currently covers sleep apnea treatment for those diagnosed in a sleep lab. But last month it proposed to cover treatment for seniors diagnosed with home tests, with a final decision coming in March. The decision will have large ramifications for the booming sleep apnea devices market, which generated more than $85 million of revenue in 2005 and is expected to reach $135 million by 2012, and cut into business and reimbursement at independent and hospital-run sleep labs.
One of the causes of the Boca Raton (FL) Community Hospital's stunning $28 million financial loss in 2007 are private auditors hired by the government. These auditors are paid a percentage of any improperly billed Medicare payments. Several Florida hospitals, including Mercy Hospital and Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, have been cited by auditors for overpayments in 2007 as well. Appeals can take up to two years and even if the hospital is eventually proved right, the auditors may still keep their contingency fees.
Doctors, hospitals and other healthcare providers in rural areas of northern New England will soon be able to use a high speed computer network to share X-rays and other medical images, patients' records and video teleconferences. The New England Telehealth Consortium will link 555 clinics, doctor's offices, hospitals, public health centers and universities.
Trial-size packages of free drug samples are popular with doctors, who often reserve them for poor or uninsured patients. A new study shows, however, that most of the free medications go to wealthier patients who have insurance.
A Texas-based developer and Wichita, KS-based Presbyterian Manors of Mid-America Inc. are teaming up to build a $155 million continuing care retirement facility in Kirkwood, MO. Marketing for the community began in October 2007, after the Kirkwood City Council approved the plans for the facility, and more than 300 people have signed up to receive more information.
With many large children's hospitals in the Twin Cities, University of Minnesota Children's Hospital (UMCH) needed to show consumers that they have a choice when it comes to their children's care. The hospital's marketing team knew that the care the hospital gives to children and the patient stories they had to tell could differentiate them from the competition.
"Originally the facility was thought of as a place you'd only go for acute care," says Bill Faude, creative director and copy writer with UMCH's agency Storandt Pann Margolis (SPM) in La Grange, IL. "We wanted to show people that the facility could be used for a variety of procedures and that's a big part of why we did the work we did."
From that need to rebrand and capture regional market share, the team created the 'This is more' campaign.
Though they used a multimedia approach, the campaign's TV spots and its peer to peer level strategy made it distinctive. For example, one spot features a 'patient' named Ella. Her father speaks about the excellent care Ella received at UMCH, but also about how the level of care benefited the family. UMCH shows that though getting its message out about its professionals and their abilities is important, the patient and patient's family are its primary focus.
"Many other organizations deliver messages through their physicians but hearing medical information from professionals can feel like it's coming from Mount Olympus. We tried to empathize [with consumers]: 'Who would parents want to hear from?' and centered on the concept of getting information from those who had lived it," says Faude.
The campaign ran throughout 2007 and with Web hits doubling, targeting the consumer with a person they can relate to seems to have been the right move.
