gdpawel

A private practice oncologist told me years ago about a patient of his. The oncologist takes his vacation at the end of August. The patient was supposed to come in for chemotherapy on Wednesday, the day before the oncologist left. The patient couldn'...

A Medical Director at California Cancer Care, an oncology practice in Northern California wrote a candid letter to the Health Beat blog by Maggie Mahar. He is a member of The Century Foundation's Working Group on Medicare Reform. A very experienced a...

Now that Healthcare IT is part of the stimulus package, what are the fundamentals of Healthcare IT? Here's a primer with the top 10 questions and answers: http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2009/03/a-healthcare-it-primer.html

Nursing Homes, like deteriorating public schools, crumbling bridges and other pieces of our society's essential infrastructure have been neglected for a long time. http://www.healthbeatblog.com/2009/03/the-111th-congress-at-work-.html

Elderly nursing home residents receive relatively few cancer care services, according to a study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Few studies have examined cancer treatment and care among elderly patients residing in nursing...

Sen. Chuck Grassley and Sen. Herb Kohl will reintroduce the Nursing Home Transparency and Improvement Act on March 19th. The bill, which would require disclosure of nursing home ownership and operations and give consumers better information about nur...

$21 billion to provide a 60% subsidy of health care insurance premiums for the unemployed under the COBRA program; $87 billion to help states with Medicaid; $19 billion to modernize health information technology systems; $10 billion for health resear...

The $1.1 billion earmarked for comparative effectiveness research remained in the bill that President Obama will sign. The House conferees also insisted on keeping the phrase "comparative effectiveness" throughout the authorizing language, removing t...

Conservatives have been misinforming the public about the health IT provisions of the stimulus package by falsely claiming that it would lead to the government telling the doctors what they can and cannot treat, and on whom they can and cannot treat....

The for-profits are taking over hospices the same way they have taken over nursing homes. The Kaiser Network noted that hospice care was designed to be delivered mainly by not-for-profit groups with affiliations to religious and community groups, but...

The CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) has issued quality ratings for 15,800 nursing homes throughout the USA that participate in Medicare or Medicaid. Each nursing home is assigned a star rating, from one to five - with five being th...

State Surveys are independent evaluations of nursing facility performance. Annual surveys are conducted by state survey agencies, usually the state's department of health, using protocols, procedures, and forms developed by the Centers for Medicare &...

Nursing home residents (including any cancer patients) are already supposed to be receiving 24/7 care. The hospice service is an additional $130 a day the home receives. Because Medicare does not collect detailed data about the medical treatments a h...

Improve transparency and accountability in the ownership and operations of nursing homes Corporations would be required to disclose their owners, operators, financers, and other related parties. Facilities that were part of chains would be required ...

Niko Karvounis and Maggie Mahar track the health care system for the Century Foundation. They author the increasingly influential HealthBeat blog, where this piece appeared, "Addressing the Nursing Shortage." http://www.healthbeatblog.org/2008/09/add...

Benign Neglect and the Nursing Shortage http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2007/08/why-do-we-have-.html The nursing shortage, with UPDATE from The Industry Veteran http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2004/07/quali...

RNs are increasingly scarce in emergency departments. http://www.healthbeatblog.org/2008/09/tackling-the-cr.html

There is some innate goodness of people who go into oncology. At the time when most physicians and oncology nurses made the decision to work in oncology, there was no Chemotherapy Concession. Most of them probably had a personal life experience which...

As increasing numbers and types of anti-cancer drugs are developed, oncologists become increasingly likely to misuse them in their practice. There is seldom a "standard" therapy which has been proven to be superior to any other therapy. When all stud...

The shift in the United States, more than 20 years ago, from the institution-based, inpatient setting to community-based, ambulatory sites for treating the majority of the nation's cancer patients has prompted in large part additional costs to the go...

A recent article published by the National Institute of Health concluded that "about one fourth of abstracts at American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meetings have an author with a personal financial interest." Since many of these abstr...

The New York Times article states that the drugs, given by injection, have been heavily advertised, and there is evidence that they have been overused, in part because oncologists can make money by using more of the drug. http://query.nytimes.com/gst...

Researchers have seen that whether a tumor was a breast tumor, prostate tumor, lung tumor or colon tumor, it didn't correlate to how the cancers interacted with standard anticancer drugs. Their findings suggest that traditional cancer treatments, whi...

Research has shown that controlling production of new blood vessels can restrict tumor growth, often prolonging the life of the cancer patient. Perhaps the most widely-used anti-angiogenic agent to emerge to date is a drug called Avastin. Avastin was...

Cancer Drug Representatives Spelled Out the Way to Profit "It's clear that physicians stopped making decisions based on what made scientific or clinical sense in lieu of what made better business sense" Medicare's decision to reform the way it paid f...