The National Practitioner Data Bank has shut down public access to anonymized information about physicians after a reporter was able to identify an individual doctor’s record for a news article.

The move to protect physician confidentiality has drawn objections from consumer advocacy groups and journalists who say it marks a shift from the Obama administration’s promises of transparency.

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The American Medical Association-convened Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement in August adopted principles on developing outcome-based measures of doctors’ quality.

The recommendations will guide the consortium’s measure-development work groups as they generate metrics on patient outcomes such as mortality, morbidity, symptoms, functional health status and satisfaction with care.

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Facial transplantation once spawned science fiction-fed visions of cosmetic surgery run amok but is becoming more common as many fears about the operation prove unfounded.

There have been at least 17 facial transplants worldwide since the first was performed in 2005 for Frenchwoman Isabelle Dinoire, experts say. Three transplants have been done this year at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, the most recent one in May for Charla Nash, a Connecticut woman mauled by a chimpanzee in 2009. The hospital’s efforts are being supported by a $3.4 million Defense Dept. grant, with hopes that wounded veterans will benefit.

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Health professionals working on a temporary basis in emergency departments are twice as likely to make medication errors that harm patients, says a study of nearly 24,000 drug mix-ups at 592 U.S. hospitals.

Most of the temp workers’ mistakes were administration mix-ups made by nursing staff, who accounted for 76% of the errors. Physicians were responsible for 21% of the mix-ups, and other health professionals accounted for the rest.

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Drug- and device-makers’ financial support for continuing medical education fell for the third straight year in 2010, reaching its lowest level since 2002.

With industry support falling to $830 million — 31% lower than the high-water mark of $1.2 billion in 2007 — CME providers are relying more heavily on the fees they charge physicians. Those fees are $20 to $50 per credit hour. Annual CME requirements range from 15 to 50 credit hours, depending on the state.

Payments from doctors, hospitals, medical schools and other sources rose 9% from 2009 to 2010 and now account for more than half of accredited CME providers’ revenue. Commercial support made up 37% of the $2.2 billion in 2010 CME funding, down from 47% in 2007, according to data released in August by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education.

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More than 1,500 counties in America elect their coroners, and that voting may play a role in their decisions on whether to classify deaths as suicides.

Elected coroners report 12% fewer suicides among females and 6% fewer among males than appointed medical examiners, even after controlling for other factors that affect suicide rates, according to a study presented in August at the American Sociological Assn.’s annual meeting.

Because people who commit suicide usually do not leave notes or other explanations for their actions, it is often left to coroners to determine based on the evidence available whether a death is due to suicide, accident or some other cause. A lot rides on the decision, as many families and survivors fear the stigma associated with suicide or may lose out on insurance benefits if the death is ruled a suicide.

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The National Quality Forum in August endorsed 41 new measures of pediatric quality covering areas such as asthma, prevention and screening, and patient safety in the hospital.

None of the new standards measures patient outcomes. Instead, they measure how well physicians, hospitals and the health system are doing on processes such as the percentage of children who receive blood pressure screening by age 13.

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Physician researchers receiving federal grants will have stricter conflict-of-interest rules to follow starting in August 2012.

The first change to Dept. of Health and Human Services regulations in this area since 1995 comes in response to widely reported cases of federally funded researchers failing to disclose millions in pay from medical industry firms. Researchers soon must publicly disclose any industry payments, stock holdings and equity interests of more than $5,000 during the previous year. Their academic institutions will have to file plans with the funding agency explaining how they are managing conflicts of interest posed by such financial relationships.

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New research shows that people who smoke menthol-flavored cigarettes are 9% less likely to quit successfully than people who smoke regular cigarettes, giving ammunition to the push for the Food and Drug Administration to ban menthol additives.

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Intensive care units following a package of evidence-based interventions helped cut the national rate of catheter-related bloodstream infections by 58% between 2001 and 2009. Now more hospitals are looking to high-tech solutions to help when checklists are not enough.

Among the high-tech tools that have been well studied and recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are sponge dressings impregnated with the disinfectant chlorhexidine and catheters impregnated with antibacterials or antibiotics.

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Computed tomography use in U.S. emergency departments more than quadrupled between 1996 and 2007, but newly published data from more than 350,000 patient visits show that hospital admissions after a scan in the ED fell by more than half.

In light of concerns about potential cumulative radiation dose due to the skyrocketing use of medical imaging, the information sheds light on how CT scans may benefit patients, said Keith E. Kocher, MD, MPH, lead author of the study published online Aug. 12 in Annals of Emergency Medicine.

“There are a lot of questions to ask about the exploding use of CT scans in the ED, and one of the things you want to know is whether this is changing patient outcomes,” said Dr. Kocher, clinical instructor of emergency medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School. “It appears there’s an association between the rate of CT scans going up and physicians being more likely to discharge patients home than [there] used to be.”

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In September 2010, Kimberly Hiatt made a medical error. The critical care nurse at Seattle Children’s Hospital miscalculated and gave a fragile 8-month-old baby 1.4 grams of calcium chloride, 10 times the correct dose of 140 milligrams.

The mistake contributed to the death of the child and led to Hiatt’s firing and an investigation by the state’s nursing commission. In April 2011, devastated by the loss of her job and an infant patient, Hiatt committed suicide.

Hiatt, who had worked as a nurse for more than two decades, was another in a long line of “second victims” of medical error, the term used in medical literature to describe physicians and other health professionals who often feel guilty and depressed after adverse events. Many physicians and other health professionals hold themselves to a standard of perfection, and when things go wrong, they feel alone.

Physician health experts estimate that 250 doctors commit suicide annually — a rate about double that of the general population. When doctors believe they have made a major medical error, they are three times likelier than other physicians to contemplate suicide, said a January Archives of Surgery study.

If the first instinct after an adverse event is to retreat from scrutiny into a spiral of shame and fear, sharing the ordeal publicly is probably the last thing to cross a physician’s mind. But a small group of doctors has done just that. Here are three physicians who shared their stories with the world in an effort to tell their colleagues and their patients that to err is human.

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Wide-reaching changes announced by the Dept. of Health and Human Services would speed up the process of approving and monitoring federally funded clinical trials.

The plans, which represent the first substantive revisions to the country’s human-research subjects regulations since they were adopted three decades ago, could help ease the regulatory burden faced by the estimated 30,000 U.S. physicians who act as clinical investigators.

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