The lede:

In 2004, MatchingDonors.com helped arrange an organ transplant between a donor and recipient who met through its Web site, sparking a heated debate about public solicitation of donors.

The conversation at the Frontiers of Ethics in Transplantation conference, held last month in Chicago, showed that the controversy still hasn’t abated, even as more transplant centers soften their stance on these types of donations.

The whole shebang.

The lede:

The pace of health care quality improvement appears to be slowing, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s fifth annual report compiling federal and state data on more than 200 quality metrics.

A composite measure of health care quality improved at a 2.3% average annualized rate between 1994 and 2005, with the rate falling to 1.5% from 2000 to 2005. And in a first stab at examining the cost efficiency of the American health care system, AHRQ noted that costs, as estimated by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, jumped 6.7% from 1994 to 2005.

AHRQ, part of the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, said in its March report that cost and quality cannot be reliably compared because “expenditures are comprehensively measured, but quality is not.” Still, experts said, the new report represents another high-profile effort to link cost and quality.

The whole shebang.

The lede:

Three in five inpatients are extremely satisfied with their hospital care. And two of three patients would definitely recommend their hospital to friends and family, according to new survey data released last month by the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services.

The patient satisfaction data also show that eight in 10 patients said their physicians always explained things clearly, listened carefully and treated them with courtesy and respect.

The whole shebang.

The lede:

Under fire from anti-abortion physicians and Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists announced in March that it will re-examine a controversial November 2007 opinion outlining the limits of conscientious refusal.

The ACOG ethics committee opinion said physicians who have religious or moral objections to “standard practices,” such as abortion, sterilization or the prescribing of contraceptives, are not ethically obligated to provide those services but do owe patients a timely referral to another doctor willing to deliver them.

The whole shebang.

The lede:

One physician’s faxed order to discontinue hydrocodone, marketed as Anexsia, was misread by the pharmacist as an order to discontinue Arixtra, an anticoagulant. Another doctor intended to electronically order clonidine, an antihypertensive, but accidentally ordered the sedative clonazepam because both appeared as “CLON” on the computer screen.

These are just two of the 3,170 pairs of drug names that look or sound alike and can result in medication errors. They were found in a recent U.S. Pharmacopeia review of more than 26,000 patient records submitted over three years by 870 health care organizations. That total is nearly double the 1,750 similarly named drug pairs identified in a 2004 report issued by USP, a Rockville, Md.-based nonprofit standards-setting organization.

The whole shebang.