My lede:

Twin government reports released in May that track the American health system’s performance show that quality of care has improved at a dilatory 1.4% pace, while markers of racial and ethnic health disparities have stagnated.

“The progress of quality is incredibly slow, and disparities are persisting,” said Ernest Moy, MD, PhD, who directs the team at the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality that produces the companion reports on health care quality and disparities (www.ahrq.gov/qual/qrdr08.htm).

The whole shebang.

My lede:

Nearly a third of oncology studies published in influential journals are authored by researchers with financial conflicts of interest, according to a May 11 study published online by the journal Cancer.

Researchers examined more than 1,500 studies published in 2006 in high-impact journals such as Cancer, The Lancet Oncology, and The New England Journal of Medicine, noting when authors disclosed conflicts of interest.

The review found some kind of financial conflict, such as industry funding of research, consulting income or stock ownership, in nearly half the articles presenting the results of prospective clinical trials.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

Proper hand hygiene is one of the most important infection-control techniques. Yet getting doctors and others who encounter patients to clean their hands at the right times and in the right manner has proven to be daunting, with studies showing compliance rates of about 50% nationally.

Nearly as perplexing as why many who know better sometimes skip hand washing is how to accurately measure hand-hygiene rates.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

Yale-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut cut adverse obstetrics outcomes by about 40% after implementing a comprehensive patient safety program.

The results, published in the May American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, are the latest to show the positive effect of strategies such as training doctors and nurses in electronic fetal heart monitoring interpretation, properly using oxytocin for inducing labor and reducing elective inductions before 39 weeks’ gestation.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

The North Carolina Medical Board exceeded its authority under state law when it adopted policy threatening disciplinary action against physicians who take an active role in executions, the Supreme Court of North Carolina ruled in early May.

The 4-3 decision appears to end the board’s policy barring doctors from participating in executions, the only one of its kind in the country.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

Only 38% of licensed drivers have joined their states’ organ donor registries, with many deterred by long-held misconceptions about how the transplant system works, according to poll results released in April.

The survey of 5,100 American adults, conducted on behalf of the organ-donation advocacy group Donate Life America, found that:

• 50% think that registering as organ donors means physicians will not try as hard to save their lives.
• 44% say there is a black market in the U.S. for organs or tissue.
• 26% believe that patients determined to be brain dead can recover from their injuries.
• 23% who are undecided about donation wrongly worry that age or health conditions would make them unacceptable donors.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

A federal court in April upheld a 2007 Vermont law that lets physicians choose whether to allow their prescribing data to be sold for use in pharmaceutical marketing.

The decision came on the heels of a November 2008 court ruling that upheld New Hampshire’s ban on selling prescribers’ information for commercial uses. This reversed a district court ruling that the ban violated First Amendment protections for commercial speech.

The whole shebang.

My co-author’s lede:

In recent months, medical schools, the drug industry and Congress have sought to crack down on perceived conflicts of interest between physicians and drug companies. Now the Institute of Medicine has joined the calls for change.

The IOM issued a report April 28 warning that such conflicts could undermine the integrity of medicine, and the agency wants everyone involved in physician-drug industry relationships to rethink how they do business. The new approaches should be crafted with full disclosure at their core, the report said.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

Health care professionals, some of whom may have been physicians, played a role in the coercive interrogations of suspected terrorists held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, according to recently circulated documents from the International Committee of the Red Cross and President George W. Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel.

The reports, made public in April, showed that medical professionals were charged with monitoring detainees’ health during interrogations in which prisoners were forced to stand in stressful positions for extended periods, slammed into walls and suffocated using a technique known as waterboarding. Psychologists helped devise the aggressive interrogation tactics that the Red Cross report said amounted to torture.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

About 4,000 medical students are taking classes on everything from measuring quality to using technology to prevent medical errors, but the training is not happening in medical schools.

Rather, it comes courtesy of free online courses offered by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (www.ihi.org/openschool).

The whole shebang.

My lede:

State medical boards across the country took 60 more disciplinary actions against physicians in 2008 than they did in 2007. That increase — less than 1% — was not enough to silence critics who argue the boards are not doing enough to protect patients from bad doctors.

State medical board officials said staffing levels and funding affect a medical board’s ability to address complaints against physicians quickly and fairly.

The whole shebang.