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.

My lede:

Many scientists hoped President Obama would end what they saw as the politicization of embryonic stem cell research. They thought all Bush administration funding bans would vanish, easing the way for unimpeded research that could yield interventions for physicians to use in treating everything from Parkinson’s disease to diabetes. But those hopes may be running into political reality.

The National Institutes of Health in April proposed overturning some Bush-era restrictions on federal funding for stem cell research while leaving others in place. The rules would allow federal funds to go to research using stem cell lines derived from human embryos that are left over from fertility treatments and otherwise would be discarded. But techniques that scientists say hold promise and should be funded would be ineligible for NIH money.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

Patient safety experts have long touted the aviation industry’s use of checklists and foolproof communication procedures as a model for how doctors and hospitals can reduce the toll of medical errors.

Now a group of prominent physicians and quality experts argues that health care should copy a voluntary public-private aviation safety partnership that has reduced fatal crashes by more than half since the mid-1990s.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

Two new reports shed harsh light on the institutional review boards that are charged with protecting human research subjects from harm.

The Assn. of American Medical Colleges in 2001 recommended that IRB members disclose any financial conflicts, yet 27.4% of review boards still do not require it, according to a survey of 107 IRB chairs reported in the April Academic Medicine.

“We’ve been talking about conflicts of interest in clinical research for almost 20 years now, and the fact that nearly 30% of IRBs in medical schools don’t have policies that require disclosure is completely astounding to me,” said Eric G. Campbell, PhD, senior author of the study and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

Nearly 20% of Medicare patients discharged from hospitals were readmitted within 30 days, costing taxpayers $17.4 billion, according to an April 2 study in the New England Journal of Medicine.

About 10% of rehospitalizations were planned to continue needed care, the study found. But as many as 40% of them — or about 1 million readmissions — were preventable, said Stephen F. Jencks, MD, MPH, lead author of the study (content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/360/14/1418/).

The whole shebang.

My lede:

For ages, doctors have used lists and other reminders to help them give the right care to patients. Recently, the use of checklists in areas such as surgery and infection control has delivered remarkable results, greatly reducing morbidity and mortality.

Beginning in April, residents working in the intensive care unit at the Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C., got a different kind of reminder when caring for patients — an ethics checklist.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

The American Psychiatric Assn. in March said that to erase the risk of bias, it will phase out the $1.5 million in drugmaker money it uses to fund continuing medical education. The same month, the American College of Cardiology declined to distribute nearly half a million dollars in industry-funded, logo-branded tote bags, lanyards and badges at its annual scientific session.

The moves reflect physician organizations’ growing sensitivity about potential conflicts of interest. And if an expert panel has its way, the actions will mark the start of a shift toward reducing medical societies’ reliance on financial support from pharmaceutical companies, drugmakers and industry firms.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

About one in 50 patients leaves the hospital early, disregarding the doctor’s orders. These patients are three times more likely to be re-hospitalized within a month, according to a recent review of more than two dozen studies since 1970 that examined the phenomenon of “self-discharge.”

Patients who leave early after being admitted for a heart attack are 40% more likely to die or be readmitted with another heart attack or unstable angina in the next two years, said the study in the March Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

Rules approved in March by the Massachusetts Public Health Council bar drug- and device-makers from providing gifts to physicians and require them to publicly disclose most payments to doctors exceeding $50.

The new regulations implement a state law enacted last year and bar industry gifts such as pens, notepads and food in physician offices. The restrictions are meant to reduce health care costs and physician conflicts of interest.

The whole shebang.