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

Iowa News

Alegent’s CEO agrees to stay
Richard Hachten II, who returned to Alegent Health last fall to repair sour relations with physicians, will stay on indefinitely as CEO and president. The Alegent board in October brought Hachten, a founder of Alegent in 1996, back for two years. The board has decided to keep him for the long term at the helm of the largest hospital system in Nebraska and western Iowa. (Omaha World-Herald)

Hospital approves comprehensive strategic plan
While health care reform may result in significant changes for hospitals and physicians across the country, Spencer Hospital is preparing for the future through the development and implementation of a strategic plan. A five-year strategic plan, outlining specific hospital priorities and strategies, was approved by the Spencer Hospital Board of Trustees at the July board meeting Thursday morning. (Spencer Daily Reporter)

Drill centers on mock shootings at schools
Law enforcement, first responders, area hospitals and schools teamed up Thursday to participate in one of the largest emergency drills ever held in the Quad-Cities, with a scenario of deadly shootings taking place simultaneously at schools on both sides of the river. (Quad-City Times)

Adopted woman meets birth mother at Newton hospital
Early in the morning on Sept. 23, 1970, a 15-year-old girl from Colfax gave birth at Skiff Medical Center, in the former obstetrics unit that is now home to the Monarch Wing. Until that night, Debra Gregg Wiegand hadn’t even known she was pregnant. And because she was unconscious during the delivery, she knew nothing of her child, who was promptly handed over for adoption. (Newton Daily News)

U.S. News

How will “meaningful use” factor into doctor and hospital rankings?
U.S. News & World Report’s annual Best Hospitals rankings are now out, and Avery Comarow, the magazine’s health rankings editor, was asked whether the rankings will ever incorporate meaningful use benchmarks or other indicators of IT adoption. In an email, he says that “it’s safe to say that meaningful use of HIT will be folded into the Best Hospitals methodology at some point — provided that a link between such a measure and clinical quality can be established.” (Wall Street Journal)

Hospitals fight to lure primary-care physicians
Although family medicine needs doctors the most of any discipline, the field has the toughest time convincing medical students it’s a worthwhile investment.  Still, it’s rare that medical students can handpick their next steppingstone, but in the cash-strapped field of family medicine, residency programs fight to capture the attention of students. (Orlando Sentinel)

Nevada presses hospitals for full accounting of preventable injuries
A Nevada State Health Division analysis found hospital patients suffered 342 preventable injuries or infections during the second half of 2009, while facilities reported only 44 sentinel events. Each of the 342 cases might fit Nevada’s definition of a sentinel event. The division is pressing the hospitals to review medical records from 2009 and see if they failed to report any sentinel events, and to report them now, if need be. (Las Vegas Sun)

A mathematical David stuns a health care Goliath
A respected actuary working from his rural California home — and for a time from a hospital bed — uncovers the errors that led Anthem Blue Cross to cancel rate increases of up to 39 percent. (Los Angeles Times)

New Hampshire to test health care collaboration at five sites
Five groups of hospitals and other health care facilities are embarking on a five-year project aimed at keeping patients healthier while reducing health care costs. The five sites will become “accountable care organizations” in a project that attempts to tackle what many consider to be a big problem in the current system: having accountability spread across hospitals, doctors’ offices, insurance carriers and employers with no one group responsible for the overall management of care. (Bloomberg/Businessweek)

Putting patients at the center of the medical home
Call it a P.R. issue, an information disconnect or simply an unfortunate choice of a name, but in all the discussions about patient-centered medical homes, one group of individuals has been conspicuously missing: the patients themselves. And it’s hard not to notice the irony; in a model of care premised on the strength of the patient-doctor relationship, few people other than doctors and experts are even sure what it is or how it affects their care. (New York Times)

Bad nurses able to keep working in other states
The ease of a drug-addicted nurse’s move from one hospital job to another illustrates significant gaps in regulatory efforts nationwide to keep nurses from avoiding the consequences of misconduct by hopping across state lines. (USA Today)

North Korean health care system in crisis
North Korean doctors perform operations without anesthesia in clinics where hypodermic needles are not sterilized and sheets are not washed, the human rights group Amnesty International said in a report released on Thursday. (New York Times)