Deal reached to fix Medicare doc pay

From Politico:

Senate leaders have reached a tentative, one-year deal on the Medicare “doc-fix,” sources close to the negotiations say.

The deal pays for the must-pass extension of Medicare doctors’ payments with changes in the tax subsidy program that some consumers will use after 2014 to buy health insurance on the new exchanges.

Developing robots for the hospital emergency room

From Vanderbilt News:

Are you ready for robots in the ER?

A group of computer engineers at Vanderbilt University is convinced that the basic technology is now available to create robot assistants that can perform effectively in the often-chaotic environment of the emergency room. The specialists in emergency medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center are enthusiastic about the potential advantages. So, the two groups have formed an interdisciplinary team to explore the use of robotics in this critical and challenging setting.

Team member Mitch Wilkes, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, presented an overview of the group’s thinking on Monday, Dec. 6, in a paper titled, “Heterogeneous Artificial Agents for Triage Nurse Assistance,” at the Humanoids 2010 conference held in Nashville.

The paper proposes a system of cognitive robots that gather medical information and take basic diagnostic measurements and ultimately provide tentative diagnoses to the human staff in order to address the critical concerns facing emergency departments in major hospitals: shortening the time that patients must wait, relieving the strain on overburdened emergency room staff and reducing the number of mistakes that are made.

“ER nurses wrong half the time”

Ed. Inflammatory headline, eh?

From the Toronto Sun:

Emergency room nurses doing the initial medical assessment on patients underestimated how sick they really were in about half the cases later reviewed by nursing experts.

Some patients waited more than one hour to be assessed despite rules requiring they be triaged within 15 minutes.

Some of the sickest patients waited more than six hours before being seen by a nurse or doctor in the ER.

These are some of the revelations in the 2010 Ontario Auditor General report released Monday.