Laws passed recently in California now require hospitals to make public their staph infection rates and also increase measures to prevent them. State inspections in recent years have found that some hospitals have done little to prevent the spread of staph infections, through things like unsterile equipment.
Some physicians believe an "unresponsive administration" has led to the mismanagement of Medicare's Physician Quality Reporting Initiative. About half of the physicians who began reporting quality measures last year under the program did not receive a pay-for-performing bonus. Reports are now available about doctors' performances, although many say those do not offer enough information about how improve.
The Surgeon General's office is pushing for increased awareness of deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism, conditions that affect as many as 600,000 Americans each year. These blood clots are easily treatable when detected early, but too often go unrecognized. According to data, 100,000 or more deaths are attributed to DVT and PE conditions annually.
As consumers head into open-enrollment season, they are dutifully signing up for company wellness programs, picking from increasing numbers of health plans, and trying to be smart consumers. Now Minnesota has a bunch of new ideas for the healthcare of the future, and telemedicine is just one of them.
Las Vegas-based MountainView Hospital is in danger of losing Medicare and Medicaid funding after Nevada health inspectors reported finding blood on the floor of a lab, an assistant handling equipment with bloody gloves, and no system to track whether patients picked up infections from certain medical procedures. The hospital has submitted a plan to correct the problems, and inspectors said the hospital faces an unannounced inspection during the coming months that will determine whether problems have been fixed.
Hartford, CT-based St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center confirmed that it will eliminate 50 positions, mostly employees who don't deal directly with patients. The job cuts come as the St. Francis takes steps to "stabilize" its expenses and prepares for the upcoming fiscal year, hospital representatives said. "This will not impact the level of care our healthcare workers provide to patients every day," the hospital said in a statement.
As many as 10,000 Indiana children have become eligible for the State Children's Health Insurance Program under a recently approved expansion, state officials announced. The expansion of eligibility to children up to age 19 in households earning up to 2 times the federal poverty level was approved by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in May. The new eligibility level is a sliding scale that includes families of two earning up to $35,000 per year and families of four earning up to $53,000.
Executive physicals are marketed as the ultimate medical checkups for consumers. In these one- or two-day sessions, executives undergo a battery of high- and low-tech medical tests and comprehensive evaluations by physicians. But Brian Rank, MD, medical director of HealthPartners Medical Group and Clinics of Minnesota, argues they do not live up to their promise in an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Rank says the physicals are often just expensive, unnecessary tests.
Two Massachusetts labor groups say they have launched a website to monitor treatment of patients and employees at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. The two groups said the Boston hospital overcharges patients and pushes caregivers to work long hours. The website will also allow viewers to post their experiences at Beth Israel Deaconess, the groups said.
In hospitals' war against drug-resistant superbugs, gram-negative bacteria is emerging as a deadly threat to the sickest and most vulnerable patients. The scourge of what was once thought to be a fairly benign class of bacteria is throwing a new wrench into efforts to contain the spread of deadly infections. While they don't cause disease in healthy people, infections by gram-negative bacteria can be devastating for those with weak immune systems.
