Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Longer Looks: Nursing Shift Changes, Electronic Health Records, Red Meat And Cancer
The Wall Street Journal: The Most Crucial Half-Hour At A Hospital: The Shift Change
Hospitals are transforming the traditional way nurses change shifts to reduce the chance of errors and oversights in the transfer of information. A critical side effect: patients feel safe, included and satisfied. Studies show that so-called bedside shift reports, with both nurses meeting in the presence of the patient during the handover, help nurses communicate better, not only with each other but with patients and their families. Studies show the approach helps reduce the number of patient falls and catch safety issues such as an incompatible blood transfusion and dangerous air bubbles that form in arteries. (Laura Landro, 10/26)
The Boston Globe: Clash In The Name Of Care
Dr. Kirkham Wood arrived in the operating room at Massachusetts General Hospital before 7 one August morning with a schedule for the day that would give many surgeons pause. Wood, chief of MGH’s orthopedic spine service at the time and a nationally renowned practitioner in his specialty, is a confident, veteran surgeon. He would need all of his talent and confidence this day, and then some, as he planned to tackle two complicated spinal surgeries over the next many hours — two patients, two operating rooms, moving back and forth from one to the other, focusing on the challenging tasks that demanded his special skills .... In medicine it is called concurrent surgery, and the practice is hardly unique to Wood or MGH. ... For patients, however, it can come as an unsettling surprise — especially when things go wrong. (Jenn Abelson, Jonathan Saltzman, Liz Kowalczyk and Scott Allen, 10/24)
Mother Jones: Epic Fail
Judith Faulkner, Epic's 72-year-old founder and one of just 18 women on Forbes' list of self-made billionaires, often dresses in costume (Lucille Ball, a Hogwarts wizard) at the company's annual meeting, which draws thousands of hospital executives and IT officers to the company's 11,400-seat Deep Space Auditorium. Her motto: "Do good. Have fun. Make money." She's solid on the second two points. Thanks to the White House's stimulus-era initiative to bring the health care industry into the digital age, her company has grown into the country's leading vendor of software in the $9.3 billion electronic health records (EHR) sector. Epic pulled in $1.8 billion in 2014 and is expanding at a rate of about 1,000 new employees a year. Kaiser Permanente, CVS's Minute Clinics, Johns Hopkins, and Mount Sinai all use Epic. But instead of ushering in a new age of secure and easily accessible medical files, Epic has helped create a fragmented system that leaves doctors unable to trade information across practices or hospitals. (Patrick Caldwell, 10/21)
Aeon: Death Of Cancer
Six years ago, I (Vincent) was diagnosed with life-threatening prostate cancer that would have killed most men. I survived because I was able to call on colleagues to deliver aggressive surgery outside the standard of care (hormone therapy) for my type of disease. Without a doubt, the operation saved my life. What happened in my case should be how things happen as a matter of course, but it’s not. (Vincent DeVita and Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn, 10/23)
Bloomberg Businessweek: How Red Meat Joined The 478 Other Things That Might Give You Cancer
Eating processed meats causes cancer, and red meat probably increases cancer risks. That’s the judgment of a panel of global experts assembled by the World Health Organization to consider the accumulated scientific evidence on the question. Eating an extra 50 grams daily of processed meat increases the risk of colorectal cancer by 18 percent, the WHO said today. While the overall risk is small, it "increases with the amount of meat consumed,” the organization said. But what does it mean to say processed meat causes cancer? (John Tozzi and Jeremy Scott Diamond, 10/26)
The Atlantic: How Meat Producers Have Influenced Nutrition Guidelines For Decades
While a doctor might advise against eating too many burgers and steak sandwiches, thanks to the exceptional lobbying skills of the American meat industry, the U.S. government probably never will. Rejecting the advice of their own expert panel, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) announced this month that the latest edition of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans will not include considerations of environmental sustainability. Had they decided otherwise, they likely would have recommended that people lower their intake of meat, the production of which is widely recognized as a major contributor to climate change. (Deena Shanker, 10/24)
The Atlantic: There Will Be Blood
[Harry] Finley, 70, is the founder of the now-defunct Museum of Menstruation, or MUM. For nearly 20 years, he’s operated the museum’s website, a collection of thousands of pages of menstrual memorabilia from reusable pads to old magazine advertisements. Before that, he was the proprietor of the brick-and-mortar MUM, which he ran out of his basement in New Carrollton, Maryland, from 1994 until 1998. Through it all, he believes, he’s also been a beleaguered soldier, a one-man war against the taboos surrounding menstruation. (Cari Romm, 10/23)
