QD: News Every Day--dry, boring health care reform? Think again.

ACP Internist's daily digest of news and events continues with how health care reform issues play out in real life, how the next generation of doctors view primary care careers, and how hospitalists are changing primary care.

Health care reform
Health care reform debates might at times seem esoteric, appealing only to economists and actuaries. For political wonks, the issue is about balancing what's possible vs. what's achievable. But the impact of reform plays out in real life and upon real lives, as profiles in Maine show. There, the need for health care reform has never been more acute. (New York Times, CBS News)

H1N1 influenza
Just in time for Christmas: flu vaccines. Drugmaker Sanofi-Aventis expects to ship 75 million doses to the U.S. market by late December, their CEO told reporters. (Reuters)

If a smartphone made its way onto your holiday gift list, an app in development could diagnose colds and flus by how the user sounds when coughing into it. (Daily Telegraph)

Primary care shortage
An internal medicine resident in San Francisco relates his eyewitness accounts of how a lack of primary care plays out in multiple care settings. A University of Alaska Anchorage student chooses to answer the call. (Los Angeles Times, The Northern Light)

Hospital medicine
Winneshiek Medical Center finished its first year with a hospitalist program. The results:
--$72,000 profit,
--decreased emergency room transfers to other facilities of 15%,
--decreased patient length of stays and an increase in observation stays by 65%,
--steady patient satisfaction of 88%, with better discharge timing,
--happier inpatient nurses, and
--approval from primary care doctors and emergency room staff.

But hospitalists aren't universally appreciated. Marcy Zwelling-Aamot, ACP Member in Los Angeles, calls them a "substitute" brought in when patients most need their existing primary care doctor. Her editorial decries all the barriers that create a wall between patients and doctors. (Decorah Newspapers of Winneshiek County, Iowa, Press-Telegram of Long Beach, Calif.)

In case you missed it ...
Do we need health care reform or health insurance reform? More than health care politics, doctors are fed up with insurance companies--paperwork, arguing on the phone, fights for what patients need. Some say they'd take pay cuts if there was a model that let them practice medical care differently. In Connecticut, internists discuss the issue in terms of health insurance reform, not health care reform. (Philadelphia Inquirer, Greenwich Time)

An Indiana health clinic is letting those who can't afford care pay for treatments by volunteering elsewhere in the community. (NPR)

Labels: H1N1, health care reform, health insurance, hospital medicine, primary care shortage, QD

posted by Ryan DuBosar at 10:28 AM