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

Iowa News

Mercy-Cedar Rapids announces plans for destination cancer center
Mercy Medical Center plans to build a $10.7 million Destination Cancer Center next to its hospital near 10th Street and Fifth Avenue SE, officials announced. Tim Charles, CEO and president of Mercy, said the timing of today’s announcement was intentional. The Cedar Rapids City Council next week will discuss Physicians’ Clinic of Iowa’s plans to build a medical mall along 10th Street. (Eastern Iowa News Now)

Union nurses at Mercy Medical Center approve new contract
Union nurses, at Mercy Medical Center, have approved their new contract with the hospital. Mercy spokesperson, Jim Wharton, says the new three-year deal includes raises of 2 percent, 2.5 percent and 3 percent over the course of the contract. (KTIV)

Egg recall: FDA says delayed rules could have prevented salmonella outbreak
Federal officials say this week’s egg recall could have been avoided if the Iowa producer had gotten into compliance with new rules before they took effect last month. The officials would not specify what rules would have made a difference and said their investigation at the Wright County producer was ongoing. (Des Moines Register)

U.S. News

Grand Junction, Colorado: Still the health care poster child
The city’s health care system provides quality care throughout the community at costs that are among the lowest in the country. And when the national health overhaul eventually passed Congress earlier this year, it laid out a vision for the U.S. health care system that mirrored some of the key features that Grand Junction’s physicians and community leaders put into place here nearly four decades ago. (Kaiser Health News)

When doctors admit their mistakes
Up until more recently, when errors occurred, the scenario that played out was always the same. Clinicians, devastated but fearful of litigation, would shut down. Patients and their families, grieving but desperate to make sense of the event, would find that their doctors and nurses were no longer responsive or available. Eventually, the most important relationship in health care, that between patient and doctor, would cede to the most adversarial one, that between plaintiff and defendant. (New York Times)

Medevac industry opposing upgrades wanted by NTSB
Industry groups such as the Air Medical Operators Association say their members should have the freedom to adopt some, but not all, of the technologies. The group, which represents companies operating more than 90 percent of medevac helicopters, has pushed its members to make voluntary safety improvements. (USA Today)

Minnesota nurses set the stage for 24-hour strike
Nurses in Duluth voted overwhelmingly to reject a new labor contract, setting the stage for a 24-hour strike. More than 90 percent of nurses who voted from St. Mary’s Medical Center and SMDC Medical Center, and more than 86 percent of those from St. Luke’s Hospital voted to reject the contract offer primarily because it did not include language that would allow them to close a unit to new admissions if they felt overwhelmed. (Minneapolis Star Tribune)

Overhaul fails to boost ‘health care confidence’
President Barack Obama’s health overhaul hasn’t helped Americans feel any more secure about their own medical care. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation said consumer confidence spiked in April after Obama signed landmark legislation. But confidence levels have since fallen back to what they were last year at the beginning of an epic congressional debate. It’s another sign of ambivalence over Obama’s historic accomplishment as Democrats campaign to preserve their congressional majorities in the midterm elections. (Associated Press)

Hospital training focuses on ending cycle of violence
Hospital emergency rooms are filled with the fallout of violent crime. Sometimes, the victims and the perpetrators are one and the same. It’s a cycle of violence many would like to end. At the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, doctors and others have developed an outreach program that appears to be working, and it has been modeled by others. (National Public Radio)

How to save $40 billion in health care costs
Electronic health records broaden access to patient data and provide the platform for pushing evidence-based decision support to clinicians at the point-of-care. This promotes optimal care for patients, reduces medical errors, optimizes the use of labor, reduces duplication of tests, and by the way, improves patient outcomes. When done in aggregate across all health providers, a team from McKinsey estimates that $40 billion of costs could be saved in the U.S. health system. (The Health Care Blog)

California launches nation’s largest ‘telehealth’ system
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger joined U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra at the UC Davis Cancer Center on Tuesday to announce the launch of the country’s largest “telehealth” system, which organizers say will one day connect patients to hundreds of hospitals and clinics statewide using broadband technology. (Los Angeles Times)

Palliative care extends life, study finds
In a study that sheds new light on the effects of end-of-life care, doctors have found that patients with terminal lung cancer who began receiving palliative care immediately upon diagnosis not only were happier, more mobile and in less pain as the end neared — but they also lived nearly three months longer. (New York Times)