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 and paper they’re pushing a computer cart.

“It brings our medical documentation into electronic form so that we can connect to Mercy Northern Iowa as well as all the network hospital in the North Iowa group,” Wadle says.

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 expansion; a majority of Republicans were opposed.

President-elect Barack Obama, who emphasized his support for an expansion of the SCHIP program during the 2008 campaign, is expected to sign the bill if it reaches his desk.

SCHIP currently covers over six million children whose parents earn too much to qualify for Medicaid — the federal health insurance program for the poor — but who can’t afford private insurance. The bill’s supporters say the legislation would extend the program to an estimated four million additional children, paying for it with a 61-cent-per-pack increase in the federal tax on cigarettes.

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 to schools, universities and, increasingly, residents who rely on the state for medical care.

Nationwide, roughly 60 million low-income people — half of them children — use the Medicaid program to get some form of healthcare, including basic physician services, prescription drugs, X-rays, dental care and even hospice care.

Some of those services are now in jeopardy.

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, live longer or avoid complications by going to Hospital A instead of Hospital B. And that obligation holds even if the doctor happens to work at Hospital B, and revealing the truth might mean patients will take their business someplace else.

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 of the IRS’ Tax Exempt and Government Entities office, during a healthcare conference in Austin, Texas, organized by the state attorney general’s office.

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 Tufts Medical Center, and colleagues reported online in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes.

The findings are consistent with much research on gender disparities in acute coronary syndromes, they added. Women with a myocardial infarction are more likely to delay seeking emergency medical care, are less likely to receive percutaneous coronary intervention, and have longer door-to-balloon times.