Healthcare Trends

At one time, being a cardiothoracic surgeon was one of the highest-status specialties a physician could practice--and many students responded by taking up the arduous training needed to become one. Today, however, it seems that status alone isn't enough. Increasingly, surgeons-in-training are refusing to undergo the 12-year training program needed to become a cardiothoracic specialist. Students are afraid they won't be able to pay back the huge student loans needed to fund this training, …

The Cleveland Clinic has named an internal medicine physician and consultant as its first chief experience officer, an increasingly popular executive role popping up at large medical organizations across the U.S.. M. Bridget Duffy, M.D. is filling the new position, which will run the Clinic's Patient First Initiative. Her job will be to create a culture which fosters empathy and …

More evidence from the "tired interns make mistakes" front. A new study presented at a professional conference suggests that extended shifts pose a threat to patient safety, not to mention the health of the interns themselves. Researchers collected more than 17,000 monthly reports from a group of more than 2,700 interns. Study author Laura Barger of Brigham and Women's Hospital then conducted a data analysis to see whether 24-hour-plus shifts were associated with reported medical errors …

Care quality, access, costs and rates of avoidable hospitalizations vary widely from state to state, with a huge gap between the best and worst performers, according to new research from a health advocacy group. The Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System, which released its "State Scorecard on Health System Performance" yesterday, found that states which provide good access to care (especially access to health insurance) tend to offer a better quality of care as …

Even when other factors like age and gender are factored out, it seems that under- and uninsured patients with cancer are likely to be diagnosed at a later stage in their disease than patients with private insurance, according to a new pair of studies published in the journal Cancer. The studies, which looked at the breast cancer and oral cancer, found that the availability and type of health insurance could predict the severity of the illness at the point when it was diagnosed. …

What was true in the past continues to be true: doctors can make big bucks. According to Forbes magazine, anesthesiologists have the highest wages in the U.S., a mean annual income $184,340 per year. That's a 5.8 percent increase over last year. Coming in at a close second were surgeons, at a mean annual income of $184,150 per year. They too saw a pay increase from last year, in this case 3.6 percent. Other leaders were OB/GYNs ($178,040), orthodontists ($176,900), oral surgeons …

A new study suggest that the majority of childhood cancer survivors aren't getting adequate follow-up care later in life. While childhood cancer treatments may save lives, they also create problems of their own, including the risk of new cancers created by treatment-related radiation. In particular, as many as 20 percent of young women and girls treated with chest radiation, commonly used for treating Hodgkin's disease, will develop breast cancer. Another risk: as many has half of the …

Here's a troubling statistic: a new study has found that when two drugs are tested in head-to-head clinical trials, researchers usually favor the drug developed by company funding the studies. The study, which appears this week in PLoS Medicine, looked at 192 trials comparing statin drugs to each other or to a non-statin. Researchers at the University of California at San Francisco found that if a drugmaker was funding a test, researchers were about 20 times more likely to find …

Far too often, patients end up dying alone in their bed in an impersonal hospital setting--particularly if they don't have friends or family to keep them company. While hospices routinely provide volunteers to stay with terminal patients who don't have family available, hospitals haven't been prepared to provide these volunteers. Increasingly, however, a new, growing movement is posting volunteers at the bedside of hospitalized terminal patients. These efforts are promoted by several …

Call it a sign of the times. For the first time, more than half the physicians entering residencies at Detroit's Wayne State University are coming in from non-U.S. medical programs. This year, foreign-educated students will fill 91 of the school's 162 residency slots, an influx which mirrors the experience of many programs in the U.S.. The new crop of students is particularly striking given that only 37 of the school's own graduates will take part in the program. School administrators …