April

The prognosis for U.S. healthcare? Better than you think.

  Erika Fry fortune.com Bernard J. Tyson, chairman and chief executive of Kaiser Permanente—the $56 billion non-profit health insurer and hospital operator—is more optimistic about America’s healthcare system than he’s ever been. That’s saying something, given that the fate of the Affordable Care Act hangs in the balance pending a …

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One Doctor’s Quest to Save the World With Data

DANIELLE VENTON www.wired.com IN RWANDA, PEOPLE have to deal with all kinds of threats to their health: malaria, HIV/AIDS, severe diarrhea. But in late 2012, Agnes Binagwaho, Rwanda’s Minister of Health, realized her country’s key health enemy was  something far more innocuous. The thing causing the most harm to her people, the leading …

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Admitted to Your Bedroom: Some Hospitals Try Treating Patients at Home

By DANIELA J. LAMAS, M.D. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com When Martin Fernandez came into Mount Sinai Hospital’s emergency room one recent afternoon, with high fever and excruciating abdominal pain, he and his family were asked an unexpected question. Mr. Fernandez, 82, would have to be officially admitted to receive intravenous antibiotics for his urinary …

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Would Doctors Be Better If They Didn’t Have To Memorize?

JOHN HENNING SCHUMANN www.npr.org  Poor old Dr. Krebs. His painstaking Nobel-winning work on cellular metabolism, called the Krebs cycle, has made him the symbol for what’s ailing medical education. “Why do I need to know this stuff?” medical students ask me. “How many times have you used the Krebs Cycle lately?” senior doctors jokingly …

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Do Wearable Devices in Hospitals Pose Security Threats?

By Aleksandr Peterso www.physiciansnews.com Wearable tech has painted itself as the future of innovation for many different industries, but perhaps most notably for healthcare. Even now, wearable devices are seeing increased use at care facilities to track patient status, reduce response times, and improve care coordination. But wearable technology is still …

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FDA Ponders Putting Homeopathy To A Tougher Test

ROB STEIN www.npr.org It’s another busy morning at Dr. Anthony Aurigemma’s homeopathy practice in Bethesda, Md. Wendy Resnick, 58, is here because she’s suffering from a nasty bout of laryngitis. “I don’t feel great,” she says. “I don’t feel myself.” Resnick, who lives in Millersville, Md., has been seeing Aurigemma for years …

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Epic, Other EHR Vendors Agree To Waive Record-Sharing Fees

By Joseph Conn www.modernhealthcare.com After years of saddling their customers and outside firms with substantial fees for interfaces and other costs for interoperability, vendors of electronic health-record systems are now engaged in what looks like an interoperability price war. The federal government probably had something to do with it, after firing …

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Doctors See Benefits and Risks in Medicare Changes

By KATIE THOMAS and REED ABELSON www.nytimes.com Dr. Robert Wergin, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, made little effort to contain his glee Wednesday over the news that Congress had voted to end a reviled payment system for doctors, simultaneously averting a 21 percent physician pay cut and overhauling the way Medicare will pay doctors in …

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5 Recruiting Tips To Fight The Looming Physician Shortage

By Sean West www.fiercehealthcare.com Increased demand for services will only exacerbate the problems expected by the shortage of close to 90,000 physicians in the next 10 years, according to a new survey that examines 2015 trends in healthcare recruitment. Despite the factors behind the shortage–including the millions of newly insured consumers under the Affordable …

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Hospital Diversity Improvement Plans, Goals: 16 Things To Know

Written by Shannon Barnet www.beckershospitalreview.com While job areas related to patient care have experienced a long history of diversification, the same cannot be said of healthcare jobs in upper management, according to a report from the NAACP. Some hospitals and health systems have created programs to monitor diversity procurement but, overall, diversity …

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Time To Announce UV Tanning ‘Causes’ Skin Cancer, Doctors Urge

Written by Catharine Paddock PhD www.medicalnewstoday.com Doctors and researchers writing in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine argue it is time to push the message that UV tanning causes – as opposed to merely being associated with – skin cancer. They note that when the US Surgeon General finally announced that smoking causes lung …

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Thousand-year-old Anglo-Saxon Potion Kills MRSA Superbug

By Nick Thompson and Laura Smith-Spark www.cnn.com It might sound like a really old wives’ tale, but a thousand-year-old Anglo-Saxon potion for eye infections may hold the key to wiping out the modern-day superbug MRSA, according to new research. The 10th-century “eyesalve” remedy was discovered at the British Library in a leather-bound volume of Bald’s Leechbook, widely …

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