U.S. News & World Report (USNWP) recently released its newest iteration of “Best Hospitals 2014-15.” It did not take long for hospitals around the country to begin to use that newsmagazine’s endorsement in their marketing materials, including offering licensing and advertising fees to USNWP for the privilege. Readers of this health policy series of are aware of my unaltered position on the importance of transparency and accountability in our national system of medical care. However, you should also be aware of my increasing skepticism that existing attempts to distill complex clinical or medical financial information into simple icons or letter grades to represent safe or quality medical care are not yet ready for prime time. Indeed, by themselves, such “ratings” can be unhelpful or even misleading in assisting an individual to select a hospital for a specific need. In Kentucky we have seen previously highly-rated services shut down when the facts on the ground were revealed. Continue reading “U.S. News & World Report’s Best Hospitals— Do we have any in Kentucky?”
Author: P Hasselbacher
Additional Court Documents Available In Kosair Charities v. Norton Healthcare.
I made another pilgrimage yesterday to Jefferson Circuit Court to review all the available public documents in this internecine dispute. In particular, I had not seen the various affiliation and other agreements between the two parties. It seems to me the case will hinge on how these agreements are interpreted.
This time I got lucky and was able to photograph everything in the official court jacket including Norton’s motion to dismiss Kosair Charities’ complaint, and Kosair Charities’ response. Accompanying as attachments to these motions were a number of major agreements made over the last 30 years between the two organizations. Links to all the items are presented below. Frankly, I have not yet had time to analyze all the documents, but it appears that most of the major arguments on either side are now out in the open. I will try to get my head around them. I confess I do so with a sense of sadness. Any help in interpretation would be appreciated. Let me know if I got any of the links wrong.
The Attorney General’s Office filed to intervene. My interpretation of the documents is that the request to join the case as a plaintiff was approved.
I had a specific interest in why Plaintiff Kosair Charities requested that Judge Perry recuse himself. I anticipated that the grounds for such a request would be made available to the public, but the recusal and transfer of the case to Division 13 and Judge Fred Cowan was made without additional comment. I suspect that the pace of the case will slow a bit as it wends its way to its new home.
Peter Hasselbacher
President, KHPI
Emeritus Professor of Medicine, UofL
Sept 5, 2014
Court Documents in Kosair Charities Committee v. Norton Healthcare,
Jefferson Circuit Court 14 CI 02523
Continue reading “Additional Court Documents Available In Kosair Charities v. Norton Healthcare.”
Crunch Time for UofL Bone Marrow Transplantation Program.
For the 30 years in which I have been associated with the University of Louisville, it’s bone marrow transplantation program has been a feather in its cap and that of the James G. Brown Cancer Center. The University of Louisville Hospital holds the Certificate of Need (CON) for adult bone marrow transplantation in Louisville – one of the tiny handful of programs that other local hospitals could not take away or did not want. Therefore I was concerned when I began to hear of doctors-lounge gossip that the program was going through a difficult patch. Unfortunately, a review of publicly available information validates my concern. Continue reading “Crunch Time for UofL Bone Marrow Transplantation Program.”
Sunshine Act’s Open Payment System To Physicians and Teaching Hospitals Launches Nearly On Schedule With Only Partial Data.
I once helped teach medical statistics. Much dark humor and many aphorisms were to be heard. For example: “If you torture the data long enough, it will tell you what you want to hear.” Another, “Garbage in — Garbage out,” is a shorthand way of stressing the importance of data integrity and reliability. If the data is not well defined, collected, accessible, or verifiable then any subsequent conclusions are correspondingly suspect. In the age of “big-data” and transparency of medical information, this latter concept of data reliability should be guarding the door of accountability. I suggest that the standards being applied so far by CMS to data collection would not be acceptable to editors of scientific journals and yet publication is going forward. Here is what CMS is saying about its Open Payment System: