Featuring hospital and health care headlines from the media and Web.

Iowa News

Local sources weigh in on health care reform
Mary Greeley Medical Center CEO Brian Dieter said hospital administrators are interested in parts of the bills that move away from the fee-for-service doctrine and toward accountable care associations. “These are the plans that would coordinate the best care that’s right for the patient, instead of the old way we deliver care: do a procedure, turn in a bill, get money,” Dieter said. (Ames Tribune)

Update: Power fails, pedestrians fall as ice thickens
Reports of power outages are coming in from across the state with ice accumulating on everything and pedestrians taking baby steps to cross parking lots and negotiate sidewalks. Thousands of customers of MidAmerican Energy in Iowa were without power at 12:30 p.m. Many customers of Alliant Energy in Iowa also lost electricity. (Des Moines Register)

Area continues Haitian relief
The parent organization of Mercy Medical Center-Dubuque, Trinity Health of Novi, Mich., is donating $100,000 to the relief efforts being coordinated by Catholic Relief Services, Catholic Medical Mission Board and Project Haiti. Mercy-Dubuque and other Trinity Health ministry organizations will also be contributing supplies and medicine through the Catholic Medical Mission Board. (Dubuque Telegraph Herald)

Facebook kidney donor update: both men on the mend
If you were Nick Etten’s Facebook Friend before December 16, you were a charter member. Since then, his life became “kind of a little nutty.” On December 17, Nick allowed surgeons to cut him open in four places and remove a kidney — all to answer a friend’s call on Facebook to help out his ailing dad. (KCRG)

U.S. News

With 60th vote gone, a search for a new strategy
Republican Scott Brown’s victory has deprived President Obama and his party of the crucial 60th Senate vote they were counting on to pass a sweeping overhaul of the US health care system in the coming weeks, sending Democratic leaders racing to devise an emergency alternative strategy and creating the very real possibility the effort could collapse. (Boston Globe)

Haiti’s health crisis deepens as recovery efforts continue
As the days roll into a week since a devastating earthquake in Haiti, the health needs for survivors in the impoverished country are changing. Many are still vulnerable to injury and death, but only in new ways. (USA Today)

Refugees from the capital swamp a model rural hospital
Much about modern Haiti is explained by the rough 35-mile journey from Port-au-Prince to Zanmi Lasante, Creole for “Partners in Health.” This oasis-like hospital, made famous by the 2003 bestseller “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” sits on a dirt road in Haiti’s central plateau, one of the poorest regions of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. (Wall Street Journal)

In Haiti, reporters who double as doctors face a new balancing act
Some of the most visible American television correspondents in Haiti aren’t just reporting the story. They’re actively participating in it in an unusual way — performing surgeries, providing medical treatment and even delivering babies on camera. (Washington Post)

Health care bill may curtail doctor-owned hospitals in Texas
Dallas-based Reliant Healthcare Partners’ plan to build 13 of the niche
Hospitals in Texas might turn out to have one major problem: It recruited physicians as investors. Health care legislation that soon may be passed by Congress would halt the growth of physician-owned hospitals and prevent any more from opening after Aug. 1. (Dallas Morning News)

Reasoning through the rationing of end-of-life care
Acknowledging that the idea of rationing health care, particularly at the end of life, may incite too much vitriol to get much rational consideration, a Johns Hopkins emeritus professor of neurology called for the start of a discussion anyway, with an opinion piece featured in this month’s issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics. (Johns Hopkins press release)