Information technology
Hospital data breach patients to receive settlement checks | Orange County (Calif.) RegisterSt. Joseph Health patients whose medical information was released in a 2012 data breach will receive checks for $242 in April as part of a class-action settlement finalized last month. Nearly 31,000 people whose personal health information – including lab results and body mass indexes – was made available on the Internet will split $7.5 million.
Electronic records and end-of-life plans | USA Today/Kaiser Health News
In a perfect world, patients with advance directives would be confident that their providers could know in a split second their end-of-life wishes. But this ideal is still in the distance. Patients' documents often go missing in maze-like files or are rendered unreadable by incompatible software. And this risk continues even as health systems and physician practices adopt new electronic health records. So advocates and policymakers are pushing for a fix.
Medical devices and equipment
Johnson & Johnson settling cases tied to device that can spread uterine cancer | Wall Street JournalJohnson & Johnson is settling a series of legal claims and lawsuits alleging that its now-discontinued hysterectomy device harmed women by spreading an undetected hidden cancer, according to court documents and plaintiff lawyers with knowledge of the settlements.
Physicians
Novartis heart-failure pill hits hurdles with doctors | Wall Street JournalIn July, Novartis AG won regulatory approval for a new heart-failure pill that it called “one of the most remarkable drugs in cardiovascular medicine in the last several decades.” Since then, it has faced a problem: getting doctors to prescribe it.
Safety, quality and clinical practice
In groundbreaking trials, surgeons to use infected kidneys for transplants | STATIn first-in-the-world clinical trials scheduled to launch later this spring, independent teams from the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University will take kidneys from deceased carriers of the hep C virus, put them into patients with renal failure, and then give them a 12-week course of an antiviral therapy in the hopes that they will emerge infection-free.
Scientists scramble to trace source of blood infection in Wisconsin | Minneapolis Star Tribune
Medical investigators are trying to unravel a mystery behind a bacteria that's caused blood infections in dozens of people in Wisconsin, including 17 people who have died.
