Hospitals Face Financial Squeeze

From the Wall Street Journal:
More than half of U.S. hospitals aren’t seeing enough patients to provide sufficient revenue to fund operations and are “teetering on the brink of insolvency” or already are insolvent, according to a study.
Restructuring firm Alvarez & Marsal said more than 2,000 of the nearly 3,900 acute-care hospitals the firm studied don’t [...]

Experts Say Different Sports Require Different Helmets

From the Washington Post:
“Don’t forget to wear your helmet,” parents tell their kids now that warmer temperatures are luring them outside to cycle, skateboard, rock climb, kayak and ride horses. And with good reason. “Helmets basically keep your skull from cracking,” says pediatric neuropsychologist Gerard Gioia, director of the Safe Concussion Outcome, Recovery and Education Program [...]

CDC: Flu season may be worst in four years

The 2007-08 U.S. flu season may be the most severe since 2003-04, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported yesterday. Flu activity peaked in mid-February with widespread activity in 49 states. As of April 5, just six states reported widespread activity: Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania and Vermont. Early results from a study [...]

As Doctors Get a Life, Strains Show

From the Wall Street Journal
U.S. medicine is in the middle of a cultural revolution, as young physicians intent on balancing work and family challenge the assumption that a doctor should be available to treat patients around the clock.
At the same time, the attempt by new doctors to lead a less-pressured work life is putting additional [...]

Iowa Hospital License Fees Increase

From the Des Moines Register:
Since 1947, Iowa hospitals have paid $10 a year for their state licenses. That is one-third of what it now costs to license a bait shop in Iowa.
The inspections department has contended that the hospital license fee is unreasonably low, given the public cost of licensing and oversight.
The Legislature last week [...]

Researchers Fault FDA Inaction On Risks of Blood Substitutes

Blood-substitute products have consistently resulted in deaths and heart attacks that could have been avoided had the Food and Drug Administration acted early enough, according to researchers who analyzed clinical studies of the products.
At issue are a class of experimental fluids, designed to replace donor blood, that the U.S. Army and Navy hope to use [...]

ER wait times posted on hospital website

Scottsdale Healthcare is the first in Arizona, and one of the first in the nation, to post real-time wait times for its hospital Emergency Rooms on its web site. Times posted on www.shc.org represent the time it takes to get a patient from the ER’s front desk to an exam room. Wait times are updated [...]

Cuts in Oregon’s Medicaid Program Led to a 20-Percent Increase in Emergency Department Visits by Uninsured Patients; Visits by Uninsured Psychiatric Patients More than Doubled

From The American College of Emergency Physicians:

Washington, DC - Cuts in Oregon’s Medicaid expansion program in 2003 led to a 20-percent increase in emergency department visits by the uninsured, and a nearly 50-percent increase in hospital admissions of uninsured emergency patients; during the same period, visits by uninsured psychiatric patients doubled.  The findings are published [...]

House blocks Medicaid rules with veto-proof majority

In continuing coverage from previous editions of Morning Rounds, the Wall Street Journal (4/24, A4, Zhang) reports that on Wednesday, the U.S. “House voted overwhelmingly to block Medicaid rules that would cut federal healthcare spending on the poor, and likely shift billions of dollars of costs to states.”  While President Bush has threatened to veto [...]

Rural Emergency Care Needs Transfusion

From JEMS.com
Rural ambulance services in Oklahoma are dying, leaving thousands of rural Oklahomans stranded without quick and dependable emergency medical care.
“It is a crisis,” said R. Shawn Rogers, Emergency Medical Services division director for the Oklahoma State Department of Health. “All across the state, we’ve got a very dicey situation.”
Since 2000, about 50 rural ambulance services [...]