ed visits

Without a doubt, last year was an important year in the evolution of the retail clinic market, with chain drug stores, retail giants like Target and WalMart, and even grocery stores welcoming them on site.

Though retail clinics may not become a household word among consumers this year, players in this niche will make dramatic progress in 2007. This …

Last week, state political leaders debated the wisdom of sustaining the charity hospital system run by the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Division, with some suggesting that there may be better ways of caring for the poor than routing them through LSU's 10 hospitals. Right now, state dollars follow the patient to whichever charity hospital they use. But state senator Tom Schedler, for one, argues that in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, it's time to remake the system …

While the insurance industry knows how to cover health catastrophes, financing day-to-day healthcare expenses is still a strain despite decades of managed care industry experience. As FierceHealthcare readers know, $7000 per year in health …

New research suggests that hospital visits decrease as the level of cost the patient bears go up. While this might be worrisome--we don't want people to avoid hospital trips and end up sicker--the study also found that the higher co-pays actually didn't have a negative effect on patient health. In fact, they saw no increase in negative clinical events such hospitalization, intensive care admission or deaths. To gather their data, researchers followed more than two million …

If Roche has its way, a gaggle of happy penguins will charm consumers into stocking up on flu drug Tamiflu. Using penguin characters from a current children's feature as a theme, Roche Pharmaceuticals has developed a multi-million dollar ad campaign to create demand for the costly medication. Tamiflu, which has attracted international attention as a possible stopgap in the war against …

While emergency department use by the uninsured remains an ongoing concern, a new study has found that ED overuse by insured patients is also a problem, at least in California. Researchers with the California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF) found that patients with chronic illnesses, in particular, made medically unnecessary visits to emergency departments. These patients had a positive image of ED care, and felt they had nowhere else to go, given that their primary care doctor was closed or …