Wachter
At the sixth International Conference on Diagnostic Error in Medicine on Wednesday, Dr. Robert Wachter gave a quick history of patient safety and quality improvement but noted that activity to reduce diagnostic errors was noticeably absent from the movement's timeline.
“There's still not a lot of action promoting this agenda,” said Wachter, professor and associate chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. He made the remark after describing events that took place after the Institute of Medicine published “To Err is Human,” its report on medical errors, in 1999.
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The American College of Physicians released a Web-based clinical decision support tool for internal medicine physicians known as ACP Smart Medicine.
Accessible from desktops, smartphones and tablets, the online tool includes 500 modules with evidence-based content and recommendations for a variety of conditions and diseases.
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McDermott
Responding to criticism that Medicare is not paying for enough seniors' skilled-nursing care following serious hospitalizations, Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) has introduced a bill that would eliminate a barrier to rehab care known as the “three-day rule.”
As it stands, the three-day rule says Medicare will not pay for the time that seniors spend in a nursing home recovering from a hospital stay unless they were hospitalized as an inpatient for three days. McDermott's bill, the “Fairness for Beneficiaries Act,” would eliminate the three-day requirement and replace it with a provision that says seniors would need a physician to certify their need for skilled-nursing, regardless of time spent as an inpatient.
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Hoven
The American Medical Association held a dedication ceremony Thursday morning to celebrate the opening of its new location in an iconic downtown Chicago skyscraper. Built in 1972 and formerly known as the IBM Building, the AMA's new headquarters is the last American office building designed by famed architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and it now goes by the name “AMA Plaza.”
The oldest and largest physician organization and its approximately 1,000 employees will be housed in the floors 39-47 of the 52-story building located between the Trump Tower and the House of Blues. Although rumors of a move to Washington surface from time to time, the 166-year-old AMA has been based in downtown Chicago since 1902 and this is the fourth location it has called home. All four locations are within a few blocks of each other, and the AMA had been at its previous site—designed by architect Kenzo Tange—since 1990.
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Here's a sobering thought: Nearly 40% of all children in the U.S. are eligible for the Children's Health Insurance Program, which provides automatic healthcare coverage for the poor. That means 4 in 10 kids in the U.S. are growing up in poverty or near-poverty.
Here's another sobering thought. Not every kid who is eligible gets coverage through the entitlement program. Their parents must apply for CHIP/Medicaid and many don't.
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The Federal Trade Commission has thrown a few wet blankets in the go-go world of healthcare corporate transactions in recent years, in the form of litigation to block mergers. But the agency's new director says most of the FTC's enforcement of antitrust laws actually happens in the less-discussed context of out-of-court settlements known as “consent orders.”
Deborah Feinstein, director of the FTC's Competition Bureau, told audiences at a legal conference in New York on Tuesday that litigation is too slow, costly, uncertain and imprecise to be used in every situation. Whenever the commission has a “workable settlement offer” that repairs the competitive harm, commissioners may decide a settlement is in the public's best interest.
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The American College of Physicians is nervous about where HHS is headed with the criteria for meaningful use of electronic health records.
The organization wrote a letter to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology addressing “what has been released for Stage 2 and what we have been told to expect for Stage 3” in the federal EHR meaningful-use program.
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Hoven
“To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of the death of private practice medicine have been greatly exaggerated,” Dr. Ardis Dee Hoven, president of the American Medical Association, said in a news release touting the findings of a recent survey that indicates how the trend toward hospital employment of physicians may be overstated.
According to the AMA's new Physician Practice Benchmark Survey, 53.2% of physicians were self-employed in 2012, 41.8% were employed and 5% were independent contractors.
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Declaring that the “move toward team-based care requires fresh thinking,” the American College of Physicians released a new policy paper that outlines professionalism, licensure, reimbursement and research principles for such teams to follow. The document appears unlikely to settle deep divisions between physicians and their team members on those matters.
Teams of physicians, nurses, physician assistants, clinical pharmacists, social workers and other health professionals require “a new way of thinking about clinical responsibilities and leadership, one that recognizes that different clinicians will assume principal responsibility for specific elements of a patient's care as the patient's needs dictate,” according to the authors, Robert Doherty, ACP senior vice president for government and public policy, and Ryan Crowley, ACP senior health policy analyst. The paper, “Principles Supporting Dynamic Clinical Care Teams,” was published Monday in theAnnals of Internal Medicine.
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A new study of electronic cigarettes offers the first clinical evidence of their effectiveness in helping tobacco smokers quit, though it does not address their safety.
The report, published Monday in the medical journal The Lancet, assessed the efficacy of e-cigarettes compared with nicotine patches in helping smokers quit. Patches are one of seven FDA-approved nicotine replacement therapy products. The FDA has not yet issued any assessment of e-cigarettes.
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A substantial number of Americans are worried about the security of their medical information.
Nearly 1 in 8 people have withheld information about themselves from a healthcare provider due to concerns about security and privacy, according to a study published online by the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
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