News From Around the Web
> Wikipedia is the single leading source of medical information for both patients and healthcare professionals, according to a new report published by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics. The report, Engaging Patients through Social Media, also found that federal regulatory bodies, more and more, are taking advantage of social media to connect to a wider audience, and that social media engagement lags "significantly" within the population segment that uses healthcare services the most--patients over the age of 50. Announcement
> Patient privacy advocates in the U.K. are up in arms over the government's plan to collect health information on every individual on a centralized database, and then share that data with healthcare professionals, including pharmaceutical companies, SC Magazine reported. People will have the ability to opt out of sharing their data, but privacy advocates say that the policy should be changed so that people can opt in to the program, instead. Article
Provider News
> Uninsured patients and women are much less likely to undergo interhospital transfer, a contributing factor in healthcare disparities, according to a new study in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, in collaboration with a team from the University of Iowa and University of Toronto, set out to examine the relationship between patients' insurance status and interhospital transfers by analyzing data from the 2010 Nationwide Inpatient Sample. They focused on patients between 18 and 64 years old who suffered from biliary tract disease, chest pain, pneumonia, septicemia and skin or subcutaneous infection. Article
Medical Imaging News
> Five radiology technologists are suing a Tennessee hospital, alleging that they were exposed to excess radiation for several years because the walls in and around the radiology imaging center in the emergency department were built without the required lead shielding. The technologists--two of whom were pregnant at the time they claim they were exposed to excessive radiation--say the walls in the emergency department at Methodist Medical Center in Oak Ridge, Tenn., did not have the required protective radiation shielding due to building design and inspection error. Article
Health Finance News
> The compensation of specialist physicians has soared in recent years due to their increasing concentration on minor but often lucrative procedures that drive up healthcare costs, the New York Times reported. The inflation adjusted incomes of dermatologists, gastroenterologists and oncologists rose at least 50 percent between 1995 and 2012, while incomes for primary care physicians rose only about 10 percent, according to the Times. Article
And Finally... I'll bet their parents are proud. Article