The lede:

For the first time, physicians and patients can directly compare hospitals’ mortality outcomes for heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia care using the Dept. of Health and Human Services’ Hospital Compare Web site.

The risk-adjusted data on Medicare patients from 2005 to 2007 were unveiled in August and represent the first set of outcomes metrics made available in such detail on the site. Government officials and patient-safety advocates want the new information to help patients make medical decisions and spur hospitals and physicians to make systemic changes to lower their patient death rates.

The whole shebang.

The lede:

To avoid leaving sponges or surgical instruments inside a patient after surgery, nurses count these items when a procedure begins and ends. While cases of retained foreign objects are rare — occurring once in every 5,000 surgeries — discrepancies in counts happen in 13% of surgeries, according to an August Annals of Surgery study.

The whole shebang.

Lede:

Stem cell scientists in growing numbers say their work is being hampered by restrictions on the financial compensation that can be offered to women who donate oocytes for research.

“Why would a woman take 40 injections and go through everything else involved in oocyte donation in exchange for bus fare?” Dr. Wood asked. “It’s wrong to ask women to go through this process and not pay.”

Limits on compensation are making it hard to find women willing to undergo the time-consuming, often painful process of egg donation, which involves taking a regimen of hormone shots to stimulate oocyte production for surgical retrieval, said Samuel H. Wood, MD, PhD, who is CEO of Stemagen, a private embryonic stem cell research firm in La Jolla, Calif.

The biggest complaints have come in California, where voters in 2004 approved $3 billion to fund stem cell research. California accounts for more than half of federal, state and private U.S. spending in this area, according to an August 2007 study by the Rockefeller Institute of Government and the Alden March Bioethics Institute’s Federalism and Bioethics Initiative.

The whole shebang.

The lede:

Primary care doctors say the greatest obstacle they face in prescribing opioids to treat chronic pain is scrutiny from regulators and law enforcement, according to a survey released earlier this year.

But that fear is misguided, says a study in the September issue of Pain Medicine, the journal of the American Academy of Pain Medicine.

Researchers reviewed nine years of medical board and local, state and federal law enforcement charges against doctors for improperly prescribing opioid analgesics. They found that 725 doctors were accused of criminal or administrative offenses from 1998 to 2006. The figure represents about one-tenth of 1% of practicing physicians, or one of every 954 doctors.

“The conclusion of our study is that there is risk [in prescribing opioids]; we’re not denying that,” said study co-author Myra Christopher. “But the risk is manageable and the risk has been exaggerated.”

The whole shebang.

The lede:

Measles are coming back. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that measles outbreaks have reached a peak not seen since 1996. By late August, 131 cases had been confirmed in 16 states.

Almost half of the cases occurred in children who had not been vaccinated because their parents claimed religious or personal exemptions to vaccine mandates.

“This measles outbreak may be a warning shot,” said Paul A. Offit, MD, chief of the infectious diseases division at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “We now have communities that have a lack of herd immunity. That puts children at risk.”

Other physicians and public health experts are echoing Dr. Offit’s concern. They say states are making it too easy for parents to exempt their children from the vaccines required for school entry. As scientifically unfounded information about vaccine risks swirls around the Internet and among parents, experts say the exemption rate is bound to grow.

But others worry that toughening the opt-out process, or just talking about mandates, could lead to an even greater loss of public trust in the immunization system.

The whole shebang.