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

Iowa News

Iowa Health Systems spending $18 million to expand fiber optic network
Iowa’s largest hospital group is investing nearly $18-million in federal economic stimulus money to expand its statewide wireless and fiber-optic health-care network. Bill Leaver, president and C.E.O. of the Des Moines-based Iowa Health System, says the improvements will help bring telemedicine devices into the homes of patients in rural areas so their doctors can watch over them more closely. (Radio Iowa)

Syphilis cluster found in Polk County
Polk County’s health department is reporting a spike in the number of syphilis cases. Health department officials say they have confirmed six cases of the sexually transmitted disease in the past six weeks. That is approximately the number the agency confirms in a typical year. (Sioux City Journal)

U.S. News

The debate over electronic medical records
The whole purpose of IT is to improve efficiency and make information more readily available to those who are qualified to receive it. But it’s also about to set off a debate that will likely last years, if not decades, about the trade-offs between efficiency and patient care, patients’ rights and what constitutes adequate care. This is the kind of debate that hasn’t taken place outside of groups like the American Hospital Association and the American Medical Association; it’s now wide open for public review. (Forbes)

Grassley demands report on Medicaid finances and enrollment
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee, pressed the Obama administration to release a congressionally mandated report on the status of the Medicaid program. The report, due Jan. 1, is required to cover the “financial status of, enrollment in, and spending trends for” Medicaid. (The Hill)

How a checklist saved lives at Ann Arbor area hospitals
Michigan hospitals joined in a study they say kicked off a culture change in local intensive care units by requiring doctors to use a short checklist to remind them of proper procedures for inserting central IVs — and giving nurses the authority to call them out if they didn’t. Infection rates for the procedure plummeted. (AnnArbor.com)

Home-care program gives mother and daughter, 110 and 85, long-awaited reunion
An intensive program at the Washington Hospital Center is designed to care for very sick old people in their homes and keep them out of the hospital. “The idea . . . is to do home-based primary care for the most ill elders in the community,” said Eric De Jonge, a physician with the hospital’s Medical House Call Program. “That’s the mission.” (Washington Post)

He’s not a patient, but plays one for class
Matthew Sharbaugh, a second-year student at the University of New England College of Osteopathic Medicine in Biddeford, Maine, signed away his youth for 12 days to play the part of an 85-year-old man in ailing health at the Old Soldiers’ Home in Chelsea. (Boston Globe)

Hospitals try new approach to patient-specific marketing
Customer relationship management systems are making their way into the health care industry so hospitals can market to patients and physicians the same way supermarkets do — by sending information they think a customer needs or wants based on their history. (American Medical News)