Hospitals Get Tech Upgrade

From KAALtv.com:
Going to the doctor just got a lot easier…
Seven rural Iowa hospitals are in the stages of transforming their health record system electronically.
And it’s not only hospitals becoming efficient but patients as well.
Coming into a doctor’s office you see often physicians carrying around charts, checking on your medical history. Not anymore.
Instead of pushing pen [...]

House passes expansion of children’s health program

From CNN:
Congressional Democrats flexed their new political muscle Wednesday as the House of Representatives passed legislation expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) by more than $32 billion over five years.
The bill, which will be taken up by the Senate next week, passed by a margin of 289-139. A majority of Democrats supported the [...]

Struggling states cut healthcare for poor

From the LA Times:
At least 44 states are facing budget shortfalls over the next two years totaling more than $350 billion, according to a recent survey by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal Washington-based think tank.
Unable to run deficits like the federal government, states have been scrambling for months to cut aid [...]

Should Patients Be Told of Better Care Elsewhere?

From the NY Times:
An article published online in October in the journal PLoS Medicine really hit home with me. Noting that the quality of cancer care is uneven, its authors argued that as part of the informed-consent process, doctors have an ethical obligation to tell patients if they are more likely to survive, be cured, [...]

Non-Profit Hospital Executive Compensation

From Modern Healthcare:
Although executive compensation was legally “reasonable” at nearly all of the not-for-profit hospitals singled out for review by the IRS, the salaries may still raise some eyebrows.
“Compensation was pretty high, and while permissible under current law, I wonder how it will be received in the court of public opinion,” said Steven Miller, commissioner [...]

Women, ACS, and EMS

From MedPage Today
Women with cardiac symptoms are more likely than men to have longer-than-average trips to the hospital, found a study of EMS activity in a major American city.
Women were 52% more likely than men to be delayed 15 minutes past the median time of 34 minutes in EMS care, Thomas W. Concannon, Ph.D., of [...]