Hospitals are getting another grade.
Dozens of quality and safety report cards already scrutinize hospital performance. Now patients and physicians will see a letter grade to sum up how well a hospital does on 26 patient-safety metrics based on publicly collected data.
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The growth rate in physician ordering of computed tomography scans began to slow between 2005 and 2008 and has flattened since then, according to data from six large HMOs that corroborates trends seen in emergency departments and among Medicare patients.
The trend suggests that research demonstrating a link between radiation exposure from medical testing and cancer is having an impact on how often doctors order CTs as well as how much radiation is used when conducting imaging studies, doctors said. High-profile physician organization educational efforts and cuts in Medicare payment for imaging also have contributed, they said.
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Surveys of physicians in recent years have found that doctors frequently recommend placebo treatments to mollify patients and describe them in deceptive ways, despite ethical guidelines urging them to steer clear of those practices.
Now questions are being raised about whether it may be OK for physicians deceptively to use placebos in certain situations and what should count as a placebo.
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The physicians, nurses and clerical support staffers in medical offices say the frenetic work pace and high patient volume are making it harder to provide top-notch care.
More than 70% feel rushed when taking care of patients, and 52% say there are too many patients for the number of doctors and other health professionals in the office. Forty-one percent believe their office “has too many patients to be able to handle everything effectively,” said an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality survey of 23,679 people working in 934 U.S. medical offices that was released in June.
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In Red Eye, Melanie Zanona writes about a recent series of street attacks in Chicago:
While none of the victims were seriously injured — the Michigan man suffered a broken jaw and the Gold Coast man suffered lacerations and bruises to his head and body — the attacks have once again raised concerns among Chicagoans and tourists on how to protect themselves.
Hmm. If my jaw were broken, I’m pretty sure I’d consider it a serious injury.
Two states that require pharmaceutical companies to report how much they spend on marketing their products saw little shift away from brand-name drugs in doctors’ prescribing habits, said a study in the May 28 Archives of Internal Medicine.
The findings come as the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services works to address more than 300 responses from physician organizations, drugmakers and others to its proposed rule to implement the Physician Payments Sunshine Act that was included in the 2010 health-system reform law. In May, CMS announced that federal requirements for medical industry firms to collect data on payments to doctors would not begin until 2013. They had been set to start this year.
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Physicians are accustomed to fielding many challenging questions from patients, but there is one query that they may find especially flummoxing, considering the delicate terrain it requires them to traverse.
The question: “Doctor, will you pray with me?”
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One in seven drug packages stored in physicians’ pharmaceutical sample closets is expired, and an estimated $2.2 billion worth of drug samples go to waste each year, a study says.
Researchers took inventories of the drug sample closets at 10 primary care clinics in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Of the 12,581 sample boxes or packages examined, 14% were expired, said the study, published in the May-June issue of the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine.
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A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel is recommending approval of an over-the-counter, rapid at-home HIV test that would let patients take control of determining their HIV status and could expand the rate of testing.
But some physicians and public health experts say the product, the OraQuick In-Home HIV Test, would allow patients to skip pre- and post-test counseling. It also could hinder efforts to educate patients about practicing safe sex and starting treatment, they said.
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