Hospitals begin to reopen their wallets: MedCity Morning Read, Jan. 25, 2010

Highlights of the important and the interesting from the world of health care:

Hospitals begin to reopen their wallets: After a recession-induced spending freeze on big-ticket items like imaging machines and robotic surgery systems, hospitals look to be loosening their purse strings a bit, Dow Jones reports. As a result, things are looking up for companies like GE Healthcare and Intuitive Surgical that sell such equipment, and presumably, the same goes for smaller suppliers of capital equipment for hospitals. Jeff Immelt, GE’s chief executive, said on the company’s earnings call that he believes “the market has at least stabilized and might be improving,” according to the report.

For example, Intuitive in the fourth quarter sold 110 of its “da Vinci” motion-capture surgical robots that cost about $1.4 million each, up from 85 sales a year earlier. One big customer was the Cleveland Clinic, which bought five of the company’s newest–and hence most expensive–robot systems, bringing its total to seven spread among three hospitals. Allan Siperstein, chairman of the Clinic’s surgery institute, explained the purchase:

“We had enormous demand on our existing equipment,” and after analysis of future needs, “this was easily the number we arrived at,” he said. The machines are frequently used for minimally invasive pelvic surgery, and Cleveland Clinic surgeons also commonly use them for heart procedures.

The need for a national health information system: Writing at KevinMD, Dr. Edward Pullen makes the case for a national health information database. Essentially, such a system would be a collection of all a patient’s medical records, and in its ideal form a record of every test, interaction and treatment a patient had received in his or her life. The appeal of such a system seems rather obvious, and may very well have broad appeal to most Americans, though there would of course be legitimate privacy concerns. “Tremendous amounts of duplicate testing, and testing and testing done only because lack of availability of other information, is ordered by physicians doing their best to provide timely and quality care,” Pullen writes. And that testing is often expensive and, if duplicative, almost completely wasteful.

The only problem I see with such a system is the overriding distrust of the government that somewhat inexplicably holds sway over such a large swath the American population. A national system of health records would almost by necessity need to be funded, operated and overseen by the government, but until many Americans get over their largely illogical and irrational fear of “government-run health care” and “socialized medicine,” this idea–whose time has come a long time ago–will continue to elude us, just one of many factors forcing up the price of health care for all Americans.

The health overhaul – why we are where we are: A post from The Health Care Blog provides an excellent rundown of how health-overhaul efforts have played out, and why they’ve thus far produced the results (or lack thereof) that we’ve seen. A couple somewhat overlooked points that the author, Jeff Goldsmith makes: While President Obama seems to understand the link between our economic malaise and high health costs (and thus the value of reform) he’s done an extremely poor job of making the case to the American public, which could account for some of the resistance to overhaul efforts.

Secondly, could former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who was Obama’s handpicked leader for the health overhaul and one who holds key Congressional relationships, have helped to produce better results had he not been derailed by tax transgressions? One of Obama’s key problems in health reform has been his willingness to cede the process and shape of reform to Congress, and one wonders if Daschle would’ve better helped Obama rein in Congress. Alas, we’ll never know.

Radiaton vibe: The New York Times has a lengthy, and at times heartbreaking and infuriating story about the harm that radiation therapy sometimes causes to cancer patients through computer and human error. While radiation is capable of helping diagnose and treat diseases, it also can lead to irreparable and horrible damage to those who erroneously receive too much of it.

While this new technology allows doctors to more accurately attack tumors and reduce certain mistakes, its complexity has created new avenues for error — through software flaws, faulty programming, poor safety procedures or inadequate staffing and training. When those errors occur, they can be crippling.