Health Care Headlines

In 2007, nearly 14 percent of Californians reported they were unable to see a doctor when necessary due to cost. Between 2003 and 2009, health insurance premiums for California families increased by 39 percent. Individuals saw an even greater increase with premiums rising 41 percent, according to the Common Wealth Fund.

Medicare Pioneer accountable care organizations have until the end of the business day July 15 to inform CMS officials whether they plan to remain in the program for a second year. Also next week, the CMS is supposed to offer results of the program’s first year, details about year two, and the names of those Pioneer participants that won’t continue.

Studies of healthcare systems in the U.S. and abroad show providers have achieved financial and clinical success with implementing telehealth services, according to a report by the healthcare research arm of Computer Sciences Corp.

Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center has recently launched a program meant to provide patients care in a faster and more efficient manner.

When low-income patients compare hospital care to primary care, they find the former to be more affordable, convenient and trustworthy than the latter.  And that, according to a new study from the University of Pennsylvania, is why those patients tend to use emergency rooms and hospitals more heavily than primary care.

When used incorrectly, healthcare technology can have detrimental effects on patient care. Medications can be distributed incorrectly. Follow-up care can be cut short. Patient data can be mismatched. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) issued a health IT safety plan last week to address this and the role of health IT in patient safety. 

Community Memorial Health System honored 326 employees at its annual Employee Recognition Dinner, including one employee with 45 years of service, one with 40 years and three others who celebrated their 35th anniversary with CMHS.

Not-for-profit hospitals want more clarity about what could jeopardize their tax breaks under new requirements for billing, financial aid and community engagement under the 2010 healthcare reform law.
 

The 85-year-old Orinda resident couldn’t believe the size of her bill from John Muir Health. For an emergency room visit that spanned three hours, charges on her statement came to $11,596.27.

As the population gets older, and the baby boomers begin to enter their 60’s and 70’s, one might assume that the number of trips to the emergency department will also increase. This is contradicted by new research from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), which shows that population aging will not cause the number of emergency department (ED) visits to increase between now and 2050. However, visits will become longer and hospitalizations will become more frequent. This research will appear in the July issue of Health Affairs.

California is big and diverse, enough so that the California Hospital Association and three regional affiliates formed the Hospital Quality Institute to strengthen patient-safety and quality issues in the state. In a video interview, CEO Julianne Morath, former chief quality and patient safety officer for Vanderbilt University Medical Center, talks about why the institute was formed and plans for an upcoming board meeting.

UnitedHealth Group Inc. is leaving the individual health insurance market in California, forcing about 8,000 customers to seek new coverage.

With the Ninth Circuit’s denial of the California Medical Association’s (CMA) request for an enbanc hearing, the injunction against payment reductions by the California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) are set to begin, but when physicians will actually be affected is unknown.

While public health nurses report high levels of job satisfaction, they are “extremely unsatisfied” with their salaries, lack education and training resources, and don’t see opportunities to grow into leadership roles, survey data shows.

The California Endowment and the California Department of Health Care Services have announced commitments totaling $26.5 million in support of Medi-Cal outreach and enrollment services.

Hospitals have fretted for years over how to make sure doctors, nurses and staff keep their hands clean, but with only limited success. Now, some are turning to technology — beepers, buzzers, lights and tracking systems that remind workers to sanitize, and chart those who don’t.

The California Endowment has pledged $26.5 million in funding for Medi-Cal outreach and enrollment assistance that will be used by the state to draw down matching federal dollars, for a total of $53 million for the effort.

As the ink dries on the newly-signed state budget, Governor Brown and state lawmakers have taken a significant step forward in improving California’s fiscal health.  This year’s on-time, balanced budget hopefully sets the groundwork for a new era in collaborative governance between the Executive and Legislative branches of state government.

Millions of Californians will remain uninsured after the signature reforms of the Affordable Care Act roll out in 2014. Legislators are proposing an employer-funded trust to insure many of those who will likely fall through the cracks of the Affordable Care Act.

Outpatient care coordination does not significantly reduce hospitalizations among high-cost Medicare patients, researchers say. Instead 90% of inpatient spending for those patients was “for treatment of conditions that you wouldn’t think would be preventable by outpatient management.”

A medical center with long emergency department wait times is running a pilot study to test whether telemedicine can connect doctors to the virtual bedside of waiting patients much faster.

The Medicare Shared Savings Program is not producing rapid rewards for the systems that are piloting accountable care organizations in the initial wave of the project.

As baby boomers — born between the mid-1940s and 1960s— began to retire, researchers projected a national nursing shortage in 2011 that they say remains today.

Despite two months of pain induced by Medicare cuts under the deficit-reduction law triggered this year, advocates for hospitals and physicians are waiting until fall to push a legislative fix.

The Senate Committee on Health yesterday approved a measure to reverse some of the Medi-Cal provider rate cuts passed by the Legislature two years ago. It’s an urgency bill, which means it needs a two-thirds legislative vote to pass.

Feeling backed against a wall by petitioners from an AIDS activist group, Los Angeles City Council members agreed Wednesday to place a measure on next year’s ballot asking if voters want the city to create an independent health agency. But then they agreed to also file a lawsuit challenging the validity of such a measure.

Despite the influx of millions of new Americans gaining coverage next year because of the healthcare reform law, the projected percentage cost increase to treat patients is expected to decline as consumers become savvier in how to spend healthcare dollars, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers Health Research Institute report.

About half of Americans say they don’t know how the Affordable Care Act will affect them. Four in 10 think the 2010 law has been repealed or overturned, or they are unsure where it stands. So chances are good that when the major provisions kick in next year, including online health insurance marketplaces and new standards for health plan costs and coverage, people are going to have questions. Lots of questions. When they do, the biggest one of all may be where to turn for answers.

Doctors will begin taking patients Wednesday at Kaiser Permanente’s newest South Bay medical facility in Carson. The three-story building has been under construction for a year. 

California’s budget agreement announced and approved last week puts a couple hotly contested health care issues on hold, making some stakeholders nervous and angry, but for the most part, this year’s balancing act is kinder to health and social services than any spending plan over the past half decade, according to legislators and veteran Sacramento watchers.

Patient crowding and boarding in Emergency Departments (EDs) impair the quality of care as well as patient safety and satisfaction. Improved timing of inpatient discharges could positively affect ED boarding, and this hypothesis can be tested with computer modeling.

After years of devastating cuts to the health and human services budget, this year’s small surplus brought restoration of some programs.

Several members of the Los Angeles congressional delegation asked the federal government Tuesday to postpone moving hundreds of thousands of chronically ill seniors and disabled patients into managed care.

An independent study released today on the economic impact of Medicaid expansion under healthcare reform found that states’ share of the cost of expanding Medicaid under reform would be lower than the cost of providing uncompensated care to their uninsured residents.

On Friday, the Assembly shelved for the year a bill (AB 975) that would have required not-for-profit hospitals to justify their tax-exempt status by providing more details about the charitable care they provide.

AB 975 began as a charity care mandate bill…then it became a measure threatening the tax exempt status of nonprofit hospitals…and then it changed yet again as an effort to create a one-size-fits-all definition of charity care and community benefits.

The Joint Commission shared four myths about sentinel event reporting — a voluntary system for self-reporting an occurrence or risk of unexpected death or serious injury — to dispel misconceptions in a Joint Commission Online report. 

Local nonprofit hospitals have taken a stance against a proposed bill that aims to standardize the definition of charity care and community benefits in California.

An analysis of the dramatic geographic variation in U.S. healthcare spending contends that the health of the patients—not what doctors and hospitals do—accounts for most of the differences.

Health care providers, health plans execs and health care workers are planning the “largest ever health rally at the state Capitol” for June 4.

A federal appeals court on Friday denied a second request by California doctors, pharmacists and hospitals seeking to undo the state’s 10 percent provider rate cut for treating the poor.

The emergency department continues to be challenged by its own internal problems even as it seeks to work with other hospital departments to overcome bottlenecks that can affect the efficiency and quality of patient care.

Covered California will announce the health insurance plans that will be
offered by private insurance companies through Covered California once the
marketplace goes online in the fall.

Workers at University of California hospitals around the state picketed for a second day Wednesday over staffing and pension issues.

In a new online video released today, the California Hospital Association (CHA) profiled an innovative mobile medical clinic program in Los Angeles County that would be jeopardized by the passage of Assembly Bill (AB) 975, a costly and unnecessary rewrite of the state’s community benefit requirements for nonprofit hospitals.

Emergency rooms account for about half of the nation’s hospital admissions and accounted for virtually all of the rise in admissions between 2003 and 2009, according to a study released on Monday.

CHA today released a new online video illustrating the vital role that nonprofit hospitals play in the communities they serve. The video profiles an innovative mobile medical clinic program in Los Angeles County that would be jeopardized by the passage of AB 975 (Wieckowski, D-Fremont).

A high-stakes bidding war has erupted for St. John’s Health Center, a storied Santa Monica hospital, with a local billionaire teaming up with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles on an unsolicited offer.

In their relentless quest to contain costs, hospitals and health systems are examining all areas of their operations for signs of waste, even materials once considered trash.

The Emergency Nurses Association announced its strong support for the recently-introduced Registered Nurse Safe Staffing Act of 2013. This legislation, which was introduced by Representative Lois Capps (D-CA) and cosponsored by Representative David Joyce (R-OH), will improve both patient safety and quality of care by enhancing the voice of nurses in hospital staffing decisions.

A couple of weeks ago in this space I reported on Rich Umbdenstock’s remarks kicking off the American Hospital Association’s Annual Membership Meeting in Washington, D.C. The AHA president and CEO declared that the long-anticipated transformation of health care is well under way “and there is no going back.” He described how hospitals are leading the transition with initiatives to improve quality, patient safety and efficiency that already are delivering significant results.

Days after the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services released hospital chargemaster data for dozens of the most common procedures they perform, providers are mulling whether to cut their prices or do nothing at all

Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday signed a pair of consumer protection bills that prevent health insurance companies from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions and limit how much insurers can charge older residents as part of the federal Affordable Care Act.

California’s fragile economic recovery could be dealt a severe setback if pending Medi-Cal payment cuts to hospitals are implemented, according to a newly released economic issue brief prepared by the California Hospital Association (CHA).

Hospitalists and ED physicians belong to two of the largest U.S. medical specialties and increasingly they are the only physicians seen by some hospitalized patients. 

Researchers from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and the Commonwealth Fund are recommending a new Medicare public insurance option they say would combine parts of the decades-old federal health program and could reduce total health spending by $180 billion over 10 years.

State Senate President pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg today unveiled a proposal to help close gaps in crisis mental health treatment and reduce overcrowding in hospital emergency rooms, as well as in prisons and jails. 

This week, hospitals throughout the nation celebrate National Hospital Week, the nation’s largest health care event. This year’s theme – A Guiding Light for Changing Times – is the centerpiece of a promotional campaign aimed at uniting health care facilities across the country during the May 12-18 celebration.

Reports continue regarding registered nurses (RNs) who are unable to find work and of new RN graduates leaving the state for greener pastures. At the same time, some hospitals report challenges in recruiting nurses in specialty fields, and many leaders and analysts are concerned the nursing shortage might re-emerge.

Hospital emergency departments are treating growing numbers of sicker Medicare patients who require more complex and expensive treatment regiments, the American Hospital Association reports [PDF].