Featuring hospital and health care headlines from the media and Web from October 24-30.

Iowa Headlines

Soldiers see childbirth thanks to technology
Freedom Calls Foundation sets up 2,000 “virtual” meetings among soldiers overseas and their families back home. About 10 percent of these conferences involve births.  Recent calls involved Iowans and Iowa hospitals.  (October 29, Sioux City Journal)

Maquoketa hospital to renovate former skilled nursing unit space
The former long-term skilled nursing unit at Jackson County Regional Health Center will be renovated to make way for the hospital’s physical therapy unit, cardiac rehab and the fitness center and diabetes education center.  (October 28, Quad-City Times)

Red Oak hospital gets recognized
A hospital in the southwest Iowa town of Red Oak is being recognized as the number-one hospital in the state for patient satisfaction. Montgomery County Memorial Hospital public relations director David Jennings says the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services now requires hospitals that receive the Inpatient Prospective Payment System to report the results of a standardized survey of patients about their hospital stay.  (October 27, Radio Iowa)

Health care forum voices concerns, solutions
No subject was off the table. In fact, several panelists pointed out that it is not health care that needs reforming so much as access to medical care and the insurance industry that dictates decisions on care and prohibits pooling across small businesses, industries and even state lines.  (October 28, Sioux City Journal)

Regional medical district coming to Cedar Rapids
A new regional medical district is coming to Cedar Rapids. The city of Cedar Rapids, St. Luke’s Hospital, Mercy Medical Center and Physicians Clinic of Iowa are all entering a cooperative venture. It will be located along 10th Street SE in Cedar Rapids, running between the two hospitals. There are a number of medical facilities in that area already, but this would be an effort to develop more, and hopefully attract patients from around the region.  (October 27, KCRG)

Sister preserves “Legacy of Mercy”
Sister Mary Elizabeth Burns has been a member of the Sisters of Mercy for 63 years, So when the Estherville, Iowa, native began writing a history of the Sisters’ health care heritage in Iowa, Michigan and Indiana, she knew much of this history from personal experience. It still took 10 years of on-and-off research, however, before her book, “Beyond Measure: A Legacy of Mercy,” could be completed — and published earlier this year.  (October 29, Sioux City Journal)

Task force tours fourth Iowa mental institute
After touring the fourth of the four state mental health institutes Monday, a task force of Iowans will now spend a few weeks figuring out what to do next.  The Iowa Mental Health Institute Task Force will make a report to the director of the Iowa Department of Human Services, which runs the four mental health institutes, about the impact that closing an institute would have on the community and patients.  (October 27, Des Moines Register)

U.S.  Headlines

It’s alive! End-of-life counseling in health bill
The Medicare end-of-life planning provision that 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin said was tantamount to ‘death panels’ for seniors is staying in the latest Democratic health care bill unveiled this week. The provision allows Medicare to pay for voluntary counseling to help beneficiaries deal with the complex and painful decisions families face when a loved one is approaching death.  (October 29, Associated Press)

Massachusetts nurses my join big union
Unionized nurses in Massachusetts are moving toward affiliating with their counterparts in California and more than 20 other states to create the largest nurses union in US history, a 150,000-member powerhouse that would lobby lawmakers for higher staffing levels and an overhaul of the nation’s health care system.  (October 29, Boston Globe)

Can “bundled” payments help slash health costs?
Under the “bundled” payment approach being tested by Medicare, the program makes a single reimbursement for all the hospital and doctor care for heart and joint procedures, rather than making separate payments to the facility and physicians. Such combined payments are getting close attention during the healthcare debate as a way to encourage hospitals and doctors to work together to hold down costs and improve care.  (October 26, USA Today)   

A prescription for success: don’t bother nurses
Striving to reduce interruptions that lead to mistakes, teams of nurses at the different hospitals came up with a variety of methods – often surprisingly low tech – to alert others they were administering medications. The strategies included everything from wearing brightly colored vests or sashes to establishing “quiet zones” or making announcements at key points in the day when medications are being administered.  (October 28, San Francisco Chronicle) 

Who picks up the tab for health reform
Beyond the contentious battle over the public insurance option, there’s a huge fight over another question: Who will pay to cover the uninsured? It’s safe to say doctors will give up the least, pharmaceutical and medical device makers will fall somewhere in the middle, and insurers will be the big losers. The 85% of citizens with insurance of any kind should probably assume that most costs levied on other parties to health reform will be passed along to them through higher premiums.  (October 22, Business Week)

Innovations in health care delivery
Sometimes lost in the big health care debate over how to insure more people, more efficiently, are some of the smaller innovations that offer surprisingly significant improvements in care and cost.  This series of reports focuses on some of those innovations.  (October 27, Wall Street Journal)

In China, too, health care system in disarray
Over the past five years, the Chinese government has tried to provide coverage to more of its 1.4 billion people. But even people covered by a minimal health insurance program are often left with big hospital bills and must pay for most outpatient services and medication. In addition, more than 300 million people do not have any health insurance. The gap in the quality of care also has been steadily growing.  (October 28, Washington Post)