indigent patients

Consultants are warning that Georgia's largest public hospital, Grady Health System, can't survive financially unless it undergoes major management changes. Despite rounds of belt tightening, including an early retirement buyout extended to 400 workers, consultants are estimating that the hospital will face a $78 million shortfall by the end of 2007. What's more, the hospital's physical plant is in bad shape, its IT infrastructure is severely outdated and customer service is poor, …

Troubled by a recent case in which a woman died awaiting treatment in its emergency department, at least one Los Angeles County supervisor is pressing Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital to train its staff better. Supervisor Yvonne Burke wants to see the hospital, which treats many indigent patients, require customer service training for key employees. Officials are responding to the recent death of Edith Isabel Rodriguez, a 43-year-old woman who died in the emergency department lobby …

As if state healthcare administrators weren't facing enough problems already, they're now battling a lawsuit over free care provided after Hurricane Katrina. Doctors at a New Orleans-area hospital, West Jefferson Medical Center, have sued the state for $100 million. The 381 physicians bringing the suit argue that state officials should reimburse them for treating indigent patients, which they've done since August 2005 in the wake of the hurricane. The physicians estimate that 30 percent …

Concerned about the cost of providing care for indigent patients, group of eight North Carolina clinics, health systems and county agencies have set up a collective designed to streamline care for the uninsured. The CapitalCare Collaborative is working to make sure patients use less expensive nonprofit and county agencies for routine care rather than visiting the region's emergency departments. To help members coordinate such care, the group will share uninsured patients' financial and …

Disagreements over the future of the Louisiana healthcare system temporarily came to a halt yesterday, when Gov. Kathleen Blanco and U.S. Sen. David Vitter agreed to begin planning for a new teaching hospital in downtown New Orleans. Vitter and Blanco intend to give Louisiana State University an initial $74 million to buy land and hire architects, the first steps in the building process. Gov. Blanco expects to give LSU another $226 million in federal money, once the school has developed a …

Officials with the LSU charity system say that they're saving hundreds of millions of dollars a year thanks to their ongoing disease management program. While 20 states are experimenting with disease management programs for Medicaid and other indigent patients, LSU has been offering such programs at its charity hospitals for as many as ten years. The LSU programs focus on the effective management diabetes, asthma, cancer, congestive heart failure and HIV. The programs include standard …

The Maryland Health Care Commission has found that a third of all Maryland's emergency room visits are for non-emergency conditions that could be treated in another setting. Over a one-year period, 2.3 million patients visited Maryland ERs. "Of those visits...18 percent were for conditions that weren't emergencies at all, and 17 percent required rapid treatment but could have been dealt with in primary care doctors' offices." State legislatures are concerned by this over-use because …

Jumping on a trend that seems to be gathering momentum, the UC Davis Health System may be the next medical center to strictly limit how much pharma company swag doctors are allowed to accept. Interestingly, the initiative is being driven by Garen Wintemute, an emergency doctor and UC Davis professor, rather than a bioethics think tank or executive board looking to polish its reputation. The effort is also endorsed by many UC Davis medical students.

While the restrictions are only …

In Indiana, doctors and hospitals are protesting a plan to transfer the state's Medicaid patients to three private insurers. Providers are vehemently resisting the change because the insurers have proposed a 30 percent cut to physician reimbursement for Medicare patients. Doctors and hospitals say that the steep cuts will force physicians to limit the number of Medicaid patients they treat, leaving a high number of indigent patients to receive expensive emergency care. Insurance company …

For some time now, we've been hearing about problems in the nation's emergency departments, but the issue became all too real this week when a woman …