About twenty years ago as President of LibertyHealth each of our hospitals (a medical school affiliated teaching hospital and two community hospitals) had an ICU. I was always concerned that sometimes patient acuity in one of the community hospital ICUs might have exceeded its capability and pushed for clear clinical threshholds for patient transfer to
A little background…. I was appointed President and CEO of Jersey City Medical Center (JCMC) in 1989, one year after JCMC had been converted to not-for-profit governance after a long and colorful history as a public hospital (including bankruptcy protection from 1982 to 1985). JCMC was and still is Hudson County’s (500,000+ residents) regional referral
From 1967 to 1970, during the Vietnam War, I served first as a 2nd Lieutenant and Chief Administrative Officer of the 4th Casualty Staging Flight attached to Wilford Hall USAF Medical Center, Lackland AFB in San Antonio, Texas. We received combat casualties still in battlefield bandages, often within 24 hours of injury, and either admitted
“The drug industry was more than willing to meet the need of increased opioid administration and more than willing to advance its usage….. Adding to this pressure to overprescribe powerful analgesics was the decision by Medicare to adjust payments to hospitals according to their Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) surveys. This naïve
Recently I was listening to a health call-in show on public radio during which a urologist gave advice on the diagnosis protocol for prostate cancer seemingly different and more aggressive from the one used by my urologist. I remember when the “gold standard” for PSA prostate screening was a score of 4 or below. Then
“It has to be both law enforcement and health, we have to do more of everything because of the crisis that we’re in,” said Baum, acting director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy… “We need to draw a distinction between people who are basically engaged in drug use, drug possession, and
.“The Trump administration will make this month’s Obamacare payments to insurers, a White House spokesman confirmed today, despite the president’s repeated threats to cut off the subsidies and potentially tip the insurance markets into turmoil. It’s widely anticipated that insurers would jack up premiums or exit the Obamacare markets altogether if the subsidies, worth about