My lede:

The board that administers New York’s stem cell research funding program recently approved using state money to pay women who donate fresh oocytes for an experimental technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, also known as therapeutic cloning.

The policy makes New York the first American government body, state or federal, to use taxpayer dollars to do more than reimburse egg donors for direct expenses incurred in donating. Opponents of the move said it would encourage women to undertake a painful, sometimes risky procedure for speculative research.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

The Food and Drug Administration in January 2008 advised parents to avoid giving over-the-counter cough and cold medicines to children younger than 2 because potential overdosing risks outweigh the symptom-relieving benefits. But a new study found that many parents are confused by medication labels that say “infant” or display child-friendly graphics such as pictures of teddy bears.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

Apple Inc., maker of devices such as the iPod and the iPhone, is headquartered in Cupertino, Calif. The company’s CEO, Steve Jobs, lives in the area. Yet when Jobs needed a transplant to replace his liver, diseased by the spread of pancreatic cancer, the iconic Silicon Valley executive did not get his new organ at nearby Stanford University Medical Center — or anywhere else in California.

Instead, he traveled more than 2,000 miles to Methodist University Hospital Transplant Institute in Memphis, Tenn., where the wait list for a liver is about 80% shorter, according to data from the United Network for Organ Sharing. The median wait for a man Jobs’ age to receive a liver in the organ-allocation region where Memphis is located is 543 days — about a third the wait time of Jobs’ home California region.

The case highlights longstanding regional disparities in wait lists for life-saving transplants and has reignited debate over how a few well-to-do patients are able to register as potential recipients at distant centers to better their odds of getting an organ. These inequities in the nation’s organ-allocation system should be addressed, say transplant physicians and medical ethicists.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

Protecting patients from harm is medicine’s bedrock goal, but the resources required to do so have never come cheaply. With the recession taking its toll on the health sector, doctors and other medical professionals who have tackled problems ranging from hospital-acquired infections to patient falls find their efforts increasingly scrutinized on dollars-and-cents grounds.

Ninety percent of hospital CEOs have cut administrative expenses, staff and services amid the recession, according to a survey of more than 1,000 chief executives released in April by the American Hospital Assn. More than three-quarters said they cut capital spending and nearly half scaled back ongoing projects.

The moves come at a time when hospitals already are facing a changing payment landscape. For example, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and many private payers have cut or stopped paying for “never events,” such as wrong-site surgeries.

President Obama has proposed bundling payments for hospitalization and care 30 days postdischarge, penalizing hospitals with high one-month readmission rates. The administration says the move would save $8.4 billion and give hospitals more financial incentive to reduce the 20% 30-day readmission rate among Medicare patients.

Given all that, it was no surprise to hear phrases not frequently uttered in patient-safety circles — cost-benefit ratio, return on investment, cost effectiveness — flutter about the 2009 Patient Safety Congress convened in May. The annual event, organized by the Boston-based National Patient Safety Foundation, brought more than 1,200 doctors, nurses, pharmacists, patient-safety officers, risk managers and hospital executives to National Harbor, Md., across the Potomac River from the nation’s capital.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

Primary care doctors fail to inform patients of about one in 14 abnormal test results, according to a study of 5,434 medical records at 23 physician practices in the Midwest and on the West Coast.

Few practices have rules on how to manage test results and often leave the process to individual physicians, according to the study published in the June 22 Archives of Internal Medicine. Having electronic medical records was no guarantee of better test-results tracking.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

The controversy surrounding the medical care pop star Michael Jackson received before he died at age 50 in late June has drawn attention to the difficulties doctors face when caring for high-profile patients.

There is little ethical or clinical guidance for physicians that specifically addresses celebrity patients and how to ensure that their fame does not interfere with delivering the right medical care.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

The Food and Drug Administration is falling short in how stringently it evaluates medical devices before they are approved and how well it detects problems with the products once they hit the market, according to a Government Accountability Office report issued in June.

“These shortcomings … raise serious concerns about FDA’s regulation of medical devices,” concluded the GAO report.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

Dad needs a new kidney. His son, wanting nothing more than to return the gift of life his father gave him, gets tested to see whether he can donate a kidney. But the test reveals that he is not just a bad match, but also not biologically related to the man he believes is his father.

In such a situation, are physicians and other transplant professionals obliged to tell what they have learned about the paternity? If so, whom do they tell?

Although rare, wrongly attributed paternity is discovered during histocompatibility testing in 1% to 3% of all living kidney donations, according to a study of U.S. and Canadian transplant data published May 27 in the journal Transplantation.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

Five Washington patients with terminal illnesses ingested lethal doses of medication prescribed for them by physicians under their state’s new death-with-dignity law, approved by 58% of voters in a November 2008 ballot initiative.

At this article’s deadline, 14 patients had made written requests for life-ending prescriptions, according to a Web site updated weekly by the Washington State Dept. of Health. Thirteen lethal prescriptions had been dispensed by pharmacies. In two of these cases, a mental health professional was consulted and filed a compliance form. The psychiatric referral is required if the attending or consulting physician has doubts about the patient’s mental competence.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

Some parents, concerned that vaccines could injure their children, choose to forgo or delay childhood immunizations. One barrier to convincing on-the-fence parents of the benefits of vaccines is that the downside of refusing seems minimal. Parents who opt out often have good reason to believe that herd immunity will protect their children from harm.

But a new study finds that, at least with regard to pertussis, vaccine refusal is not risk-free. Children whose parents refused the pertussis vaccine were 23 times likelier to contract the disease than were immunized children, according to a June Pediatrics study of 156 pertussis cases drawn from the Kaiser Permanente Colorado health plan. One in 10 pertussis cases was due to vaccine refusal, the study found (pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/123/6/1446/).

The whole shebang.

My lede:

Hospital-associated infections annually kill an estimated 100,000 people and add $20 billion to the nation’s health care bill. The increasing prevalence of multidrug-resistant organisms, state infection reporting mandates and the looming threat of an influenza A(H1N1) pandemic have made the job of preventing infections and controlling their spread that much harder.

But amid the worst recession in decades, hospitals are cutting back wherever they can, and infection-control professionals report that their departments are not being spared.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

Under criticism from physician organizations and others for further fracturing an already disjointed health system, store-based health clinics and their supporters have argued that these nurse-practitioner-staffed offices offer uninsured patients affordable, walk-in care at convenient locations.

But most retail clinics — 86.4% — are located in well-to-do areas that are not classified as medically underserved, according to a May 25 Archives of Internal Medicine study (archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/169/10/945/).

The whole shebang.