A "Northwestern Memorial" brand hospital could rise in Lake Forest, IL, under a deal under discussion between Lake Forest Hospital and Northwestern Memorial HealthCare, which operates two large teaching hospitals in downtown Chicago. Lake Forest Hospital executives have been in merger talks with Northwestern Memorial HealthCare, parent of Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, since late last year. The talks center on Lake Forest's desire to have Northwestern Memorial commit to financing the replacement of the 67-year-old main hospital complex that houses the bulk of Lake Forest's general acute care patients.
Nearly 500 workers at Caritas Carney Hospital in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester will join the Service Employees International Union, making it the second Caritas Christi Health Care hospital to unionize this spring. In April, more than 800 employees at St. Elizabeth's Medical Center in Brighton voted to affiliate with the same labor union, Local 1199 of SEIU United Healthcare Workers East. The vote at Carney was 299 to 78, with about 79% of the 377 workers who cast ballots opting to join the union.
After an investigation, the deaths of two infants and the sickening of a third at Miami Children's Hospital is a medical mystery. The infants, born extremely premature, were in the hospital's Neonatal Intensive Care Unit when two of them died of a common yet lethal bacterium in March. County health investigators found 23 strains of the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa in faucets, sinks, and drains throughout the unit, but said that none matched the strains that killed a 7-day-old boy and a 21-day-old girl.
The cost of hospital stays for Connecticut patients without insurance has increased more than 40% since 2005, even though the number of uninsured people seeking hospital care declined in fiscal year 2008, according to a report from the state Office of Health Care Access.
The cost of providing hospital care for the uninsured increased to $239 million in fiscal year 2008, up 44% from $165 million in fiscal year 2005. Even with fewer uninsured, costs rose because hospital charges are increasing, typically 6% or more a year.
A leading psychiatrist at Emory University has been reprimanded by the school in connection with outside work he was doing for pharmaceutical companies. Zachary Stowe, MD, director of the Women's Mental Health Program, received a letter of reprimand regarding his "unreported activities" and his "failure to abide by Emory policies," according to an Emory statement.
The United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta and the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of Georgia are working together to improve access to healthcare for residents in five Georgia counties. Kaiser donated $150,000 to help community-based projects in Butts, Cherokee, Douglas, Fayette and Rockdale counties. The money will target initiatives aimed at helping the uninsured and underinsured gain access to primary care services.
Medical students who went into debt could figure on owing $126,714 in 2007 on average, up from $88,331 in 2000, and such statistics are being cited by American Medical Association as the organization prepares for their annual meeting in Chicago. Among the hundreds of policy recommendations on the agenda include some strategies aimed at reducing the med-student debt. Medical school debt load can have broad implications: It's one of the most common reasons given for problems like the shortage of physicians and the skewing of medical professionals toward specialty practices.
Employers and health-insurance companies are pushing back against parts of a health bill proposed by Sen. Edward Kennedy. Lobbyists combed through the "Affordable Health Choices Act" that the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions released. The bill would require most Americans to buy health insurance and would create government-run exchanges where they could buy policies. It also calls for a new government health-insurance plan and indicates employers would be required to help pay for employees' plans. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for example, said it fears an employer health-insurance mandate would pile new costs on business when many are struggling to remain profitable.
Two House Democrats introduced a bill to create a national database of patients who received artificial hips and knees, a system already used in some other countries to track how patients fare, reduce unnecessary surgeries, and weed out inferior products. The bill would establish a government-backed registry to track patients' results over time and help detect ineffective surgical practices and faulty devices. Patient registries are expected to play an important role in "comparative effectiveness" reviews that the Obama administration hopes will help identify which medical procedures and products work best.
Douglas W. Elmendor is facing the toughest task of his brief tenure as head of the Congressional Budget Office: attaching a price to a monumental overhaul of the nation's healthcare system. So far, the CBO has proven unwilling to assume big savings from popular reforms, such as computerizing medical records and studying the comparative effectiveness of various treatments. The CBO has estimated, for example, that requiring doctors and hospitals to use electronic records would save the government only about $34 billion over the next decade—a small fraction of the overall cost of reform.
