By John Ballard
Fierce Healthcare is an aggregator, one of those artesian wells of information that tells you more than you ever thought you wanted to know about something.
Cyber links on steroids.
Look what I just grabbed. This is only a small portion of one day's links.
?$50K bribe yields $500K in contracts with naval medical center
The co-owner of a Virginia Beach medical supply company will spend five years in jail for bribing officials at Portsmouth Naval Medical Center for lucrative contracts, the Virginian-Pilot reports. Todd Jenkins and his partner at Innovatec admitted to paying about $50,000 in bribes. They received about $500,000 in orders from the hospital.
?Evidence for health reform? You bet...your life
A poorly run healthcare system that focuses more on profits and less on quality is likely the reason Americans have shorter life expectancies than people in 12 other developed nations, a new study published in the journal Health Affairs concludes.
Researchers Peter Muennig and Sherry Glied with the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University looked at the 15-year survival rates for men and women between the ages of 45 and 65 from 1975 to 2005, taking into consideration the high rates of smoking, obesity, traffic fatalities and homicides in the U.S. They determined that while U.S. rates for all of those trends were comparable with the other 12 nations--Australia, Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, France, Germany Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland--the U.S. was the only one that doesn't provide universal health coverage.
What's more, the researchers pointed out that "unusually high medical spending" correlated with worse 15-year survival rates. While life expectancy actually went up in the U.S., it did so at a much lower clip than in all of the other nations, despite health costs increasing at a much faster rate. "Unregulated fee-for-service reimbursement and an emphasis on specialty care may contribute to high U.S. health spending, while leading to unneeded procedures and fragmentation of care," Muennig and Glide wrote. "Unneeded procedures may be associated with secondary complications. Fragmentation of care leads to poor communication between providers, sometimes conflicting instructions for patients, and higher rates of medical errors."
?HHS hands out $727M to upgrade community health centers
The Department of Health and Human Services has awarded more than $727 million in grants from the Affordable Care Act to help upgrade 143 community health centers, according to an announcement made earlier today by Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
The funds will support construction and renovation of community health centers around the country and extend access to another 745,000 underserved patients, according to an HHS press release. The community health centers will help Americans who have lost coverage or are between jobs still get healthcare services, according to Sebelius. "There is no question that the economic downturn has made it harder for some Americans to get healthcare and important preventive services," she said.
The move also has the potential of lightening the burden placed on stressed out emergency departments that have been serving as safety nets, often offering non-emergency care to the indigent. The largest share of health center patients are not insured (38 percent), 37 percent are on Medicaid, 15 percent have private insurance and 7 percent are on Medicare, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration.
The funds were made available under the healthcare reform law, which is expected to provide $11 billion over the next five years to community health centers. The funds will go toward operating, expanding and building community health centers, nearly doubling the number of patients who can receive care, regardless of insurance status or ability to pay.
?10 pediatricians yank their privileges from hospital
In an unusual move, 10 pediatricians pulled their privileges from Fort Walton Beach (Fla.) Medical Center. The children's doctors stopped making rounds and admitting patients at White-Wilson Medical Center beginning Oct. 1, NWF Daily News reports. They now admit patients to only Sacred Heart Children's Hospital, which is about an hour away.
The rift occurred in part because the pediatricians were concerned about the hospital's new pediatric ER, according to pediatrician Lynn Keefe, who was named the new head of pediatrics at White-Wilson. Although it was called a pediatric ER, she said, there was no pediatrician in the ER. "That hospital is actually saying, 'Bring us your sick kids. Bring us everything,'" Keefe told the Daily News. "What we were saying is you're calling all these kids in...but we don't have the specialists or the level of care."
Hospital officials did not answer questions about the pediatricians concerns, according to the Daily News.
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In other news, this blogger is getting very tired of pecking away, reporting how health and insurance reform a la PPACA is grinding along, like a handful of tugboats working to pull an aircraft carrier to a different place. The disease-management, drug, medical devices & procedures industry -- sometimes called the World's Best Health Care -- is as resistant to improvement as any of Dr. Phil's worst clients. Changing mindsets, whether those of patients or their doctors, is more challenging than overcoming obesity or quitting tobacco. But I'm determined to keep the faith. The alternatives to change are worse than not making the effort.
Besides, it helps me keep my mind off politics. America has experienced one of the worst episodes of history. When Bill Clinton left office there was a budget surplus and no wars. Over the succeeding eight years not only did the surplus vanish, the country had eight years of war and the global economy nearly collapsed. Barack Obama took office facing some of the biggest economic and political challenges of American history. And like Humpty Dumpty, all the kings horses and all the kings men can't seem to put Humpty together again.
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