Minnesota Governor Wants Online Health Records for All

From the Wall Street Journal Health Blog:
Online personal health records got a boost from Minnesota’s governor yesterday.
Tim Pawlenty said 50,000 state employees would be able to access their health records online next year, with a plan to extend access to everyone in the state by 2011, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports.

Trust

From the NY Times:
A growing chorus of discontent suggests that the once-revered doctor-patient relationship is on the rocks.
The relationship is the cornerstone of the medical system — nobody can be helped if doctors and patients aren’t getting along. But increasingly, research and anecdotal reports suggest that many patients don’t trust doctors.
About one in four patients [...]

Rural Medicine

From Rural Doctoring, Part of a series on becoming a physician who practices in a rural area:
Obviously, the remoteness of a community and the availability of medical services varies greatly in rural settings. The kind of medicine a doctor practices will vary as well. Family doctors are particularly well-trained to adapt to different practice scenarios. [...]

Grassley Introduces Legislation to Assist “Tweener” Hospitals

From the Iowa Hospital Association Friday Mailing:
Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley has introduced legislation to improve Medicare payments for Iowa’s “tweener” hospitals. Most of these hospitals are designated as Medicare Dependent Hospitals and Sole Community Hospitals under the Medicare program. The Medicare bill that just became law improves payments for Sole Community Hospitals but [...]

An angry response to yesterday’s Slate article

From Health Care BS:
As I have pointed out many times, a good deal of BS appears in the “news” media relating to health care. Few articles, however, reach the level of irresponsibility achieved yesterday in Slate.
The authors of this disgraceful piece of agitprop would have their readers believe that the people who run hospitals deliberately allow people [...]

Street Fentanyl Tied To Many Deaths

From the Wall Street Journal Health Blog:
Illicit versions of the painkiller fentanyl were linked to more than 1,000 deaths in this country between 2005 and 2007, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said yesterday.
The powerful painkiller, often mixed with cocaine or heroin and taken by injection, first caught the attention of the CDC in [...]

Is Keeping Patients Waiting in the ER a Good Business Move?

From the Wall Street Journal Health Blog:
Those long emergency room waits that we are all familiar with may be good for a hospital’s bottom line, a couple of academic emergency medicine docs write today in Slate.
How’s that? Patients who show up at the emergency room are less likely than patients admitted to the hospital by [...]

Medpedia: Online Encyclopedia of Medicine

From Medgadget:
A group of American medical schools is working on a project to essentially collect and organize all medical knowledge in a Wikipedia-like form. Access to MedPedia will be available to all, but editing rights will be limited to M.D.’s and Ph.D.’s in relevant fields of research. Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and Berkeley [...]

Dropping the Baton: A Qualitative Analysis of Failures During the Transition From Emergency Department to Inpatient Care

From the Annals of Emergency Medicine:
The transfer of a patient from the ED to internal medicine can be associated with adverse events. Specific vulnerable areas include communication, environment, workload, information technology, patient flow, and assignment of responsibility. Systems-based interventions could ameliorate many of these and potentially improve patient safety.

Staff Finds Rx for Hospital Via Board Game Strategy

Associated Press Stacom, Don
“Friday Night at the ER” provided department heads, managers and staff with an in-depth look at staffing levels, revenues and hospital administration after simulating a 24-hour period at Bristol Hospital in Connecticut. The program is based on a board game and divided staff into groups of four charged with managing growing [...]