Tag: healthcare
News (81)
August 26, 2012 5:49 pm
Kidney for Ohio patient's transplant put in trash (USA Today)
TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) – A nurse accidentally disposed of a kidney from a living donor this month at an Ohio hospital, and doctors tried unsuccessfully for at least two hours to resuscitate the organ in what medical experts describe as a rare accident, health officials said. “Human error rendered the kidney unusable,” University of Toledo Medical Center spokesman Toby Klinger said Saturday, but he declined to give more details, citing the hospital’s investigation into what happened and its respect for the privacy of the patients involved.
August 22, 2012 5:08 pm
Doctor burnout: Nearly half of physicians report symptoms (USA Today)
Differences varied by specialty: Emergency medicine, general internal medicine, neurology and family medicine reported the highest rates. The authors note other studies show burnout can decrease the quality of care, lead to increased risk for errors and push doctors into early retirement, as well as cause problems in their personal lives. “There have been other studies done on doctor burnout, but we assumed it was the surgical specialties who would be at primary risk,” says Shanafelt. “Instead we found out it’s the physicians on the front line of care who are at the greatest risk.”
August 20, 2012 7:09 pm
Coming Next: Using an App as Prescribed (The New York Times)
The idea of medically prescribed apps excites some people in the health care industry, who see them as a starting point for even more sophisticated applications that might otherwise never be built. But first, a range of issues — around vetting, paying for and monitoring the proper use of such apps — needs to be worked out.
August 14, 2012 7:51 pm
Doctors Fail to Review Tests Before Hospital Discharge (Businessweek)
Doctors who order tests for hospital patients don’t always read the results before the patient is discharged, raising the risk of missing potentially dangerous conditions, an Australian study found. About half of the unread tests were ordered on the day the patient left the hospital, according to research today in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Many of those results still hadn’t been reviewed two months later, the researchers said.
August 12, 2012 6:25 pm
Should you and your doctor be Facebook friends? Doctors debate better medicine vs. ethically 'icky' trend (The Seattle Times)
And what if your patients want to “friend” you? “I think that’s just a really icky idea,” said Dr. John Lantos, another conference speaker and director of the Children’s Mercy Bioethics Center at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Mo. “I don’t respond to ‘friend’ requests from patients,” Lantos said. “What if all your patients were asking you to sleep with them? Does this mean I have to? You just say no!”
August 10, 2012 11:55 am
Health reform may expose immigrant status of millions (Reuters)
As she was ushered into surgery eight years ago, Paula was confident that doctors at Washington’s Howard University Hospital would find the cancer that had been growing in her right breast for months. She was less certain about where she would wake up the next day. “I felt scared because of the stories in other states … It was always in the back of my mind that a doctor, or an immigration officer dressed as a doctor, could take me,” said Paula, 60, of the fear that she would be exposed as an undocumented immigrant and deported.
August 7, 2012 9:35 pm
At the End of Life, Talk Helps Bridge a Racial Divide (The New York Times)
Living or dying is not at issue. The question this family confronts is how the patient will die: a little sooner, with adequate morphine, surrounded by loved ones in the hospice unit, or a little later, in a never dark or quiet patch of the I.C.U., ribs broken by failed, if well-intentioned, CPR. Add to this the following: The patient and family are black. And while race should not be relevant at this moment, research tells us otherwise.
August 7, 2012 9:27 pm
Ky. judge to review Christian health care case (Yahoo News)
Justices found in 2010 that Medi-Share is insurance and should be subject to the same regulations as secular health care plans, a move that could have forced the organization to serve non-Christians and to provide costly coverage of pre-existing conditions. Medi-Share says its members aren’t buying insurance, but taking part in a charitable endeavor to help cover medical bills of fellow Christians and potentially have their own costs covered should the need arise.
August 4, 2012 12:06 pm
Komen Ads Overstate Benefits Of Mammograms, Professors Charge (Kaiser Health News)
The world’s largest breast cancer charity used misleading statistics and deceptive statements about mammography to promote breast cancer awareness and screening, authors of an opinion piece asserted. In promotional material for the 2011 Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Susan G. Komen for the Cure suggested large differences in breast cancer survival among women who undergo screening mammography and those who do not. Specifically, the advertisement stated a 5-year survival of 98% when breast cancer is caught early and 23% when it is not. … “This benefit of mammography looks so big that it is hard to imagine why anyone would forgo screening. She’d have to be crazy,” Steven Woloshin, MD, and Lisa M. Schwartz, MD, of the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in White River Junction, Vt. and the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice in Lebanon, N.H., wrote in an article published online in BMJ (Bankhead, 8/2).
August 1, 2012 9:18 am
Self-Service Kiosks Poised To Change Health Care (NPR)
Self-service kiosks have become part of daily life for many people. We use them to get our boarding passes at the airport, to check out at the grocery store and to rent movies. Now some industry watchers predict they could fundamentally change the way we get our healthcare. A pilot project in New Hampshire aims to pump up the number of potential bone marrow donors.