Kaiser Health News
Prodding here and pinging there, pop-up interruptions can turn into noise to be ignored instead of helpful nudges. Something similar is happening to doctors, nurses and pharmacists. When they're hit with too much information, the result can be a health hazard. The electronic patient records that the federal government has been pushing to coordinate health care and reduce mistakes come with a host of bells and whistles that may be doing the opposite.
The law was a response to complaints from Medicare patients who were surprised to learn that although they had spent a few days in the hospital, they were there for observation and were not admitted. Observation patients are considered too sick to go home yet not sick enough to be admitted. They may pay higher charges than admitted patients and do not qualify for Medicare's nursing home coverage.
Support for women's health care, along with family planning resources, has been dramatically scaled back, in part because of funding restrictions placed on women's clinics that, in addition to other services, provide abortions. Also, both states declined to expand Medicaid. Those decisions, many advocates say, are putting a squeeze on the health care system's ability to educate women about Zika's risks and minimize its impact.
As health care consolidation accelerates nationwide, a new study shows that hospital prices in two of California's largest health systems were 25 percent higher than at other hospitals around the state.
Despite interventions by Medicare officials, the number of appeals from health care providers and patients challenging denied claims continues to spiral, increasing the backlog of cases and delaying many decisions well beyond the timeframes set by law, according to a government study released Thursday.
Lonny Shavelson's practice will be focused on consulting not only with physicians whose patients request aid-in-dying, but also with patients themselves. Shavelson worries that patients may seek aid-in-dying because they are in pain. So first, he would like all his patients to be enrolled in hospice care.
The Food and Drug Administration removed an obstacle from of its "compassionate use" policy this month, eliminating some paperwork that physicians must do to obtain experimental drugs for some patients with immediately life-threatening illnesses.
The state Senate this week rejected legislation that would have required medical practitioners to notify their patients if they were on probation for serious infractions.
In an effort to get or keep a good performance rating from the federal government, transplant centers have been labeling some patients "too sick to transplant" and dropping from the waitlist some who may been viable candidates, researchers found. In addition, despite removing more sick patients from the waiting list, one-year survival rates for patients who received transplants didn't improve.
The portion of released prisoners with addiction problems who lacked medical insurance fell sharply after the health law's Medicaid expansion took effect, but drug-treatment rates for ex-offenders barely budged, a new study shows.