The state Supreme Court ruled that no law prohibits doctor-aided death. Now legislators will debate whether to regulate the practice or ban it.

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Many U.S. hospitals frequently deliver babies before 39 weeks’ gestation without a medical indication, according to data released in January by The Leapfrog Group, an employer-funded organization that seeks to improve health care quality and safety.

Half of 773 hospitals voluntarily reporting to Leapfrog last year said they exceeded an expert-set 12% target rate for the proportion of babies delivered early by elective induction. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists guidelines say elective deliveries should not be done before 39 weeks’ gestation.

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Better discharge planning and quicker follow-up care are keeping patients at home — and helping to avert Medicare pay cuts.

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Single-bed patient rooms, wider bathroom doors, ubiquitous hand-hygiene facilities and other hospital design elements add to the costs of construction but can pay for themselves within a few years, according to a series of journal articles published in January.

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A leading medical journal says MMR vaccine-autism study was fraudulent. Doctors still face a barrage of safety questions from worried parents.

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Nearly half of patients misunderstand dosage instructions on prescription container labels, and more than half do not comprehend the warnings on those labels, according to different studies. For years, medical experts have advocated for simpler labels to help patients take their medications as intended.

Labeling standards proposed in January by the influential U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention could make those recommendations a reality.

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Kathy Niedzwiecki of Pelham, N.H., and Ken Crowder of St. Louis needed new kidneys and had loved ones willing to donate them — but those donors were medically incompatible.

Thanks to a United Network for Organ Sharing pilot program launched in 2010 that matches incompatible donor-recipient pairs through a nationwide pool, Niedzwiecki and Crowder got the kidney transplants they needed.

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As the misuse of opioids has grown, more physicians have urged patients to sign so-called pain contracts in an effort to prevent medication diversion.

But these contracts, also called opioid treatment agreements, can be used indiscriminately and harm rather than enhance the physician-patient relationship, according to an article by a panel of physicians and pain-policy experts in the November issue of The American Journal of Bioethics.

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Skokie, Ill. — In the 1930s and 1940s, hundreds of German medical professionals took part in a euthanasia program that targeted children younger than 3 years old with severe birth defects. Doctors and midwives were required to report such cases, and parents were told that advanced care could be given to children at 30 special pediatric wards around Germany.

Instead, the children were murdered, usually with sedatives. Physicians drew up falsified death certificates, and parents were told their children died of natural causes such as pneumonia. An estimated 5,000 children fell victim to physicians and other medical professionals who went from healers to killers.

These actions were far from the exception in Nazi Germany, said experts at a recent lecture on this ghastly chapter in medical history.

The misguided scientific ideas of physicians and scientists were integral to Nazis’ crimes against humanity and should serve as a reminder to doctors to put patients before political ideology, they said.

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My lede:

Within five years, Susan Sheridan’s family was devastated by two diagnostic errors. The first came in 1995, when her newborn son Cal’s early development of jaundice — a red flag for the potential of the severe neurological disorder kernicterus — fell through the gaps in the system despite repeated attempts to alert physicians and other health professionals. As a result of delayed treatment, Cal developed cerebral palsy and has dealt with several other neurological problems.

Then in 1999, Sheridan’s husband, Pat, was told that the mass discovered in his cervical spine was benign. Six months after an apparently successful surgery to remove the mass, Pat again required surgical intervention. This time, physicians said the fist-size tumor was malignant.

But when Sheridan checked her husband’s medical chart, she was shocked to discover a pathologist’s report issued 21 days after the first surgery. The report said that first mass was malignant.

“My knees buckled,” said Sheridan, co-founder and president of Consumers Advancing Patient Safety, a Chicago-based patient advocacy organization. “It was unbelievable to me that a second significant gap in the health care system had tragically impacted my family. It was a double whammy, and it made me realize how very, very fragile our health care system is.”

The pathologist’s report apparently never made it to the neurosurgeon caring for Pat, who died after three agonizing years with spinal cancer and many more surgeries.

Diagnoses that are delayed, wrong or missed entirely result in 40,000 to 80,000 U.S. hospital deaths annually, according to research estimates. About 5% of autopsies find clinically significant conditions that were missed and, if treated, could have resulted in the patient surviving the hospital stay. Meanwhile, about 40% of medical liability lawsuits involve diagnostic errors. Nearly one in three reported adverse events involve diagnostic errors, and more than 10% of these mistakes result in death.

For the Sheridan family, two kinds of diagnostic errors resulted in calamity. In Cal’s case, a series of cognitive errors — not realizing that early-onset jaundice could be a sign of something much worse — was to blame. And a system error — failing to properly communicate a critical test result — was at fault in Pat’s case.

Experts say these two kinds of mistakes often conspire to make diagnostic errors a daunting patient-safety challenge. Fledgling efforts are under way to understand how these errors, which strike at the heart of the physician’s craft, happen and to find ways to prevent them.

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Increased scrutiny of the potential conflicts of interest posed when physicians accept gifts and payments from industry — combined with greater pay disclosure and a sputtering pharmaceutical pipeline — have led to a significant drop in doctors’ financial ties to drugmakers.

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The more hours surgeons work each week, the more depressed and burned out they are, according to newly published survey data.

Surgeons working 80 hours or more a week had the most problems. Nearly 40% reported being depressed, and more than 10% said they made a major medical error in the last three months, said the study, published in the November Journal of the American College of Surgeons. Nearly two-thirds of the surgeons who worked 80 hours a week said they had conflicts between work and personal obligations in the last three weeks.

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