Study points to segregated hospitals in New York City, and other regional news

Black patients are less likely than whites to be hospitalized at private academic medical centers in New York City, a new study has found. Those findings resurrect the hot-button belief that some private hospitals with deep pockets leave care for the sickest and poorest patients to a struggling public hospital system. Some hospitals already have pushed back against the study's findings and its implications that New York City's hospital system is a highly segregated one.

The study, published in the International Journal of Health Services, concluded that in New York City, black patients were two to three times less likely than whites to be discharged from these private academic medical centers, which are often perceived as providing superior medical care. It also found that uninsured patients were five times less likely than privately insured patients to be discharged from these hospitals.

In general, researchers found, patients at New York academic medical centers were older and more likely to be white and commercially insured, compared to patients at non-academic medical centers. They compared those statistics to academic medical centers in Boston, where minorities were overrepresented and patients were younger, more likely to be privately insured, and less likely to be white.

In both cities, a patient who was uninsured or who had Medicaid was less likely to end up at an academic medical center than a privately insured patient, the study found.

For their study, the researchers, who also came from Boston Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, analyzed the race/ethnicity and insurance coverage of adults discharged from hospitals in New York City in 2009 and 2014 and in Boston in 2009. They used data from New York City's Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System database and from the Massachusetts Center for Health Information and Analytics. —Elizabeth Whitman

Parents in New Jersey must now be informed by a physician about the addictive risks associated with opioid-based pain relievers before the medication is subscribed to their underage children.

The new state law is the first of its kind in the U.S. It's the latest initiative being taken by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's administration to address the state's opioid abuse epidemic, which has killed more than 6,000 people since 2004.

Under the law, prescribers must discuss with a parent of a patient under the age of 18 about addictive qualities related to Schedule II controlled substances—medications designated by the Drug Enforcement Agency as having a high risk for abuse—prior to prescribing them to a minor patient and, “if the prescriber deems it appropriate,” talk about the use of alternative treatments.

Prescribers must obtain written acknowledgement from the parent or guardian that a discussion took place. That will be noted in the patient's medical record with a form developed by the state's Department of Law and Public Safety. Patients in hospice care will be exempted from the law.

Drug overdose is the leading cause of accidental death in New Jersey. The state saw a spike in the rate of overdose deaths between 2014 and 2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, rising by more than 16% and resulting in more than 1,400 deaths in 2015. —Steven Ross Johnson

NYU Langone plans to invest $500 million over the next five years at NYU Lutheran in Brooklyn, vastly expanding the hospital's outpatient footprint, said Dr. Andrew Brotman, the system's chief clinical officer.

The hospital will build a $48.4 million outpatient cancer clinic to provide chemotherapy and radiation therapy to patients, according to one of several recently submitted certificate-of-need applications. The clinic will be NYU Langone's fifth regional cancer clinic, joining the health system's other satellite facilities in Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island.

Separately, the Brooklyn hospital plans to build a $10.5 million, 16-bed observation unit adjacent to its emergency department. As part of that plan, it will relocate its adult medicine and pediatric cardiology clinics from the hospital to an outpatient clinic, at a cost of $22.5 million.

The total commitment includes the costs of Lutheran's transition in 2016 to the Epic electronic health record system and future projects to improve the Brooklyn hospital's federally qualified health center, neonatal intensive care unit and OB/GYN services. The health system also plans to build an ambulatory surgery center and is exploring adding an inpatient tower further down the line. —Jonathan LaMantia, Crain's New York Business