New York Activity (104 items)
Interview with Dr. Peter Pronovost, medical director of the Quality and Safety Research Group at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and promoter of a patient safety checklist for doctors.
"Some of the nation’s leading orthopedic surgeons have reduced or stopped use of a popular category of artificial hips amid concerns that the devices are causing severe tissue and bone damage in some patients, often requiring replacement surgery within a year or two."
Infections caused by gram-negative bacteria becoming impossible to treat.
A recent report compiled by Consumers Union comparing infection rates reported by hospitals in 2008 showed that Lincoln Medical Center in the Bronx had 44% fewer infections than the national average.
The Consumer Reports Hospital Ratings study, released Tuesday, says North General Hospital's so-called central line infection rate was 394% worse than the national average - and the worst in the city.
Radiation errors can cause severe harm or death for cancer patients.
The owner of two research hospitals affiliated with the Harvard Medical School has imposed restrictions on outside pay for two dozen senior officials who also sit on the boards of pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies. Doctors who sit on Pharma boards can make hundreds of thousands extra pay a year.
Some widely prescribed drugs for depression provide relief in extreme cases but are no more effective than placebo pills for most patients, according to a new analysis released Tuesday in the Journal of American Medical Association.
The Food and Drug Administration is developing guidelines that will set tougher scientific standards for data from tests on humans that makers of medical devices submit when seeking approval of their products, a top agency official said.
Some widely prescribed drugs for depression provide relief in extreme cases but are no more effective than placebo pills for most patients, according to a new analysis released Tuesday.
The policy was approved by the hospital's Infection Control Committee, based on research studies that show that multi drug resistant organisms and other harmful bacteria remain on clothing, such as neckties.
Has our health care system fallen by the wayside?
From NYT:: A growing body of evidence suggests that doctors at some of the nation’s top medical schools have been attaching their names and lending their reputations to scientific papers that were drafted by ghostwriters working for drug companies — articles that were carefully calibrated to help the manufacturers sell more products.
A New York Times commentary, Room for Debate, ran a discussion about prescription drug ads asking whether if they should or should not be reined in as some in Congress have suggested. Of the more than 300 comments the forum generated, it’s official: the overwhelming majority would like to see these ads altered or banned altogether.
"You can't say we weren't warned. And you can't say we've done enough to address those warnings about the degree of avoidable deaths in hospitals in New York and across the country."
The New York Times features several differing viewpoints on prescription drug direct-to-consumer advertising.
Newly unveiled court documents show that ghostwriters paid by a pharmaceutical company played a major role in producing 26 scientific papers backing the use of hormone replacement therapy in women, suggesting that the level of hidden industry influence on medical literature is broader than previously known. The articles, published in medical journals between 1998 and 2005, emphasized the benefits and de-emphasized the risks of taking hormones to protect against maladies like aging skin, heart disease and dementia.
The hospital accreditation experience of a Long Island hospital.
Op-ed by Jim Hall, former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. The Obama administration should take a lesson from the transportation safety board’s successes and establish an independent agency charged with identifying and eliminating the causes of medical error.
City-run hospitals faked records and covered up dozens of botched operations, deadly accidents, malpractice and other medical screwups, a Daily News investigation has found.
According to the report, New York hospitals have lower rates of surgical-site infections than hospitals across the rest of the nation, but the same or higher rates of bloodstream infections in intensive care units than those reported nationally.
By one estimate, more than 200 Central New Yorkers die every year from infections they caught while in the hospital.
After too much delay, the agency has put out a report revealing which hospitals in New York are more and which are less likely to discharge you with a nasty bug.
The second annual Hospital-Acquired Infections, New York State 2008 Report presents infection rates identified by hospital name and region for surgical-site infections.
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil comments on reducing health care costs: "The president says he likes audacious goals. Here is one: ask medical providers to eliminate all hospital-acquired infections within two years."
A federal advisory panel voted narrowly on Tuesday to recommend a ban on Percocet and Vicodin, two of the most popular prescription painkillers in the world, because of their effects on the liver.
With the publication of this report, New York becomes the seventh state in the nation to publicly disclose hospital infection rates by individual hospitals.
NYT story about a Philadelphia VA hospital where many patients received botched cancer treatments.
Single-patient rooms are now viewed as an important element of high-quality health care.
Two annual government reports released Wednesday show that progress in improving the quality of health care and narrowing health disparities among ethnic groups remains agonizingly slow, and that patient safety may actually be declining.
In a scolding report, the nation’s most influential medical advisory group said that doctors should stop taking much of the money, gifts and free drug samples that they routinely accept from drug and device companies. Supports Grassley/Kohl legislation legislation that would require drug and device makers to publicly disclose all payments made to doctors.
Hoping to improve infection control in hospitals, the nation’s top epidemiological societies joined Wednesday with the American Hospital Association and the Joint Commission, which accredits hospitals, to issue a compendium of guidelines for preventing six lethal conditions.
It is good to know that hospitals will no longer profit from their mistakes under a new payment policy just inaugurated by Medicare.
On Wednesday, Medicare will start applying that logic to American medicine on a broad scale when it stops paying hospitals for the added cost of treating patients who are injured in their care.
The new generation of resistant infections is almost impossible to treat.
From now on the NY Department of Health aims at releasing similar data every year for each hospital separately.
Doctors face a 10 percent cut in Medicare payments next week, following the Senate’s failure on Thursday to take up legislation that would have averted the cuts.
Drug and medical device companies should be banned from offering free food, gifts, travel and ghost-writing services to doctors, staff members and students in all 129 of the nation’s medical colleges, an influential college association has concluded.
'They Can Adapt to Virtually any Pressure That We Expose Them To,' Doctors Say
Medicare will limit payments to hospitals for certain avoidable mistakes like catheter-associated urinary tract infections
New York lawmakers consider MRSA screening.
Wash Your Hands
The expansion comes as state health officials have started collecting data on infections from hospitals that it plans to publicize next year for the first time in a report card format.
The explosion in the use of three anti-anemia drugs to treat cancer and kidney patients illustrates much
that is wrong in the American pharmaceutical marketplace. Thanks to big payoffs to doctors, and
reckless promotional ads permitted by lax regulators, the drugs have reached blockbuster status.
In 2004, the year Dr. Allan Collins was chosen as president-elect of the kidney foundation, the pharmaceutical company Amgen, which makes the most expensive drugs used in the treatment of kidney disease, underwrote more than $1.9 million worth of research and education programs led by Dr. Collins.
Drug advertising aimed at consumers, a fast-growing category that reached $4.5 billion last year, will
face hard scrutiny in the new Congress, according to industry critics in both the House and Senate.
Lester M. Crawford, former chief of the FDA was charged yesterday with conflict of interest and lying about stock he and his wife owned in companies the agency regulates.
Numerous studies have shown that hospital personnel wash or disinfect their hands in fewer than half the instances they should.
A new law in New York will require hospitals to make their infection rates public.
Hospital infection kills as many Americans annually as AIDS, breast cancer, and auto accidents combined.
The United States Senate is on the verge of approving legislation that could decrease the quality of hospital care in New York and elsewhere around the country. It needs to take a moment to be sure it doesn't. The Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act allows hospitals to shield medical error data from public scrutiny. It adopts a popular and plausible theory that holds that doctors will own up to mistakes, thereby improving the practice of medicine, if they feel they are not sacrificing their careers. But the bill may have other, more insidious effects, if critics such as Consumers Union are correct.
In 2006, 11,929 cardiac bypass surgeries were performed with a combined in-hospital and 30-day mortality rate of 1.92 percent – down slightly from 2.02 percent in 2005. In 2006, the number of Percutaneous Coronary Interventions procedures increased to 57,944 from 56,058 in 2005. The 2006 combined in-hospital/30-day mortality rate was 0.87 percent.
A comprehensive study issued today by the Office of the Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr., found that many New York City hospitals substantially underreport “adverse events” to the New York State Department of Health (DOH).
The consequences of service deficiencies during off-hours include higher mortality and readmission rates, more surgical complications, and more medical errors. Given the health care industry's renewed focus on ensuring patient safety and providing high-quality medical care, why hasn't the situation changed at the "other hospital"?
Background information on causes, symptoms, treatment, and other resources
The I.C.U., with its spectacular successes and frequent failures, therefore poses a distinctive challenge: what do you do when expertise is not enough?
Betsy McCaughey has gone on a real tear. Betsy McCaughey, a journalist of distinction and former Lieutenant Governor of New York state, has taken aim at Obamacare and especially Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, brother to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, and in her op-ed piece that's being billed as New York Post Deadly Doctors, she claims that the public health care plan will deny care to the mentally disabled and elderly. However, nothing in the bill has come to light that would indicate she's correct, and the oversight agency for the program would be only be staffed by physicians.
http://http:/personalmoneystore.comI have been in a lot of hospitals on Long Island One of the things that is really amaze me is your treatment between noon & 2pm. All things stop just like in an office if you are on a gurney in hall they just leave you there !
More than 290,000 surgical site infections occur in U.S. hospitals each year. Patients who acquire infections from surgery spend, on average, an additional 6.5 days in the hospital, are five times more likely to be readmitted after discharge, and twice as likely to die.
Surgery patients are at risk for infection because surgical incisions create a pathway for germs to enter the body. Maintaining a sterile environment in the operating room is therefore critical to protect patients from being contaminated with bacteria, which can lead to infection.
How well is your hospital, state and the nation as a whole are performing on three key practices that help prevent infections during surgery? Find out here »
I was involved in a motor vehicle accident. I arrived at the hospital alert but with a dislocated hip and a fractured ankle. At the time of treatment I was told they needed x-rays and I would be getting something for pain.
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In 2003, my wife, Lisa, age 42, an insulin-dependent diabetic, collapsed into a coma while in a hospital. At the time she was discovered she had no pulse and was not breathing and her blood glucose level was almost non-existent at 2mg/dL.
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On November 14, 2003, I suffered two brainstem strokes after having an upper neck manipulation. Initially, I lost speech, feeling in my right side, had a facial droop and slurred speech. When admitted to the stroke center, I found out that this is a known risk of chiropractic upper neck manipulations.
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