Patients to get a look at physicians’ notes

From the Boston Globe: Amid the national push to computerize medical records and make them more open to patients, one of the most intense areas of debate is whether patients should be allowed to see their doctors’ notes online. Doctors write these one- to two-page comments after every visit, and other physicians who treat the [...]

Hospital: Ohio doctor likely meningitis source

From Modern Healthcare: An Ohio hospital says tests point to an anesthesiologist as the likely source of bacterial meningitis that infected two pregnant women, killing one of them. Mary Rutan Hospital in Bellefontaine says the doctor gave a spinal anesthesia to both women before they delivered their healthy babies May 21 and did not wear [...]

Weekly E-mail Reminders Influence Emergency Physician Behavior

From Wiley InterScience: Objectives: Improving physician compliance with evidence-based guidelines is challenging. The authors wanted to determine if weekly e-mail reminders to emergency department (ED) staff increase compliance with Joint Commission and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) community-acquired pneumonia quality measures. Methods: One nurse administrator reviewed records on a weekly basis for [...]

Methamphetamine Production Is Hazardous to Your Health

From the Journal of Trauma: Background: To describe the thermal injuries related to methamphetamine (METH) production, characterize patients’ courses, and compare patients with matched controls and to the previously published series. Methods: Trauma registry data from January 2001 to November 2005 was retrospectively reviewed. METH patients were compared with other burn patients of similar age [...]

Cardiac Patient Rescued from Burning Ambulance

From JEMS: ROCKY HARBOUR, N.L. — A cardiac patient had to be rescued from a burning ambulance in western Newfoundland on Wednesday afternoon after the vehicle burst into flames en route to hospital. RCMP said the ambulance was on its way to Corner Brook when it started smoking while driving up a steep hill near [...]

Insurers, Out-of-Network Payments

From the Wall Street Journal Health Blog: Today brings the last of a long string of Andrew Cuomo announcements about insurers agreeing to change the way they calculate payments for people who get health care from out-of-network providers. In what the New York attorney general called the “final agreement” in the series, the insurer Health [...]