Superstorm Sandy underlines need for Hospitals to have better Disaster Recovery Plans!

The equipment failures at NYU and nearby Bellevue Hospital, the nation’s oldest and one of its busiest, brought to the fore what emergency experts have warned for years. Despite bitter lessons from the recent past, U.S. hospitals are far from ready to protect patients when disaster strikes their facilities.

For most hospitals, “emergency preparedness” means being ready to treat a surge of patients from an earthquake or terror attack – disasters outside their walls. Even the federal program that coordinates hospitals’ preparedness at the Department of Health and Human Services has this mindset: it focuses on planning for mass fatalities and quickly reporting their number of available beds, not having redundant electrical systems.

For hospital administrators trying to keep their institutions in the black, disaster-resistant infrastructure is expensive and lacks the sex appeal of robotic surgery suites and proton-beam cancer therapy to attract patients.

Cell Phone thefts on rise in major cities.....Increased risk of Data Theft!

Police report that nearly half of ALL robberies in San Francisco this year are cell phone related - and most occur on transit lines.

Thefts of cell phones - particularly the expensive do-it-all smart phones - are costing consumers millions of dollars and sending law enforcement agencies and wireless carriers scrambling for solutions.

New York City Police report that more then 40 percent of all robberies now involve cell phones. Cell phone thefts in Los Angeles, which account for more then a quarter of all the city's robberies, are up 27 percent from this time a year ago

For the employer, increased thefts present also the issue of breech of data privacy - especially as it relates to the usage of company devices. Most employers consider information stored on company phones to be proprietary validating the reason for 'wipes' when employees leave or are terminated from a company.

Market consolidation seen as threat to Physician-owned hospitals!

The newest threat to physician-hospital ownership is market consolidation that has led to hospitals aggressively pursuing medical specialists, according to a speaker at the 12th annual conference of the physician-owned hospital trade association, Physician Hospitals of America, being held in Austin, Texas.

Kevin McDonough, a senior manager with Dallas-based consultant VMG Health, called specialists “the lifeblood of physician-owned hospitals,” and he said physician-owned hospitals are facing a growing inability to replace aging physician investors and recruit new doctors to their ranks.  Another speaker, Clinton Flume, a manager with VMG, said consolidation is being driven in part by a “herd mentality,” where one hospital is seen as “gobbling up practices” and competing hospitals become motivated to do the same.

Physicians are also driving consolidation, Flume said, as they seek employment as a way of being shielded from market forces, including reimbursement cuts—especially for cardiologists—and increasing costs for malpractice insurance and information technology. Hospitals are also seeing physician employment as the answer to staffing and on-call shortages, he added. Flume explained why a previous physician-acquisition trend in the late 1990s was “more or less a bust” as hospitals paid too much for practices and didn't receive a return on their investments while physicians became unmotivated because of a lack of decision-making authority and frustration with how hospitals managed their practices.  These pitfalls are being avoided in this acquisition cycle, Flume said, by basing future physician compensation on past productivity and developing arrangements that allow doctors to practice more independently than they did in the late '90s.

Is Hospital and Physician Group consolidation driving up the cost of medical care?

The California attorney general has launched a broad investigation into whether increasing consolidation among hospitals and physicians groups is pushing up the price of medical care, reflecting increasing scrutiny by anti-trust regulators of medical-provide deals.

The probe, which has been under way for several months, is examining hospital systems’ reimbursement from major California health insurers. The regulator appears to be focusing on whether the systems’ tie-ups with physicians, as well as ownership of hospitals, have given them the market power to boost prices in a way that violates anti-trust law.

Nationally, health-care providers are rapidly merging into bigger health systems, moves that are presumed to improve efficiency. The number of hospital consolidations in 2011 was 86 – the most since 2000. Health Affairs journal suggests that concentration among health-care providers can indeed drive up health-care prices.

Health-Care Costs Rise!

Not surprisingly, a WSJ report states that "Workers should brace for more out-of-pocket costs next year".

Most employers are planning to shift health-care costs to their employees in 2013 to help offset rising premiums.

In all, 58% of employers - a mix of large, medium and small - said they plan to increase employee contributions in 2013 continuing a trend that has persisted since 2005.

Prior to that, generally, only one third of employers said they planned to shift costs.

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Wal Mart to offer more vaccinations in stores as it seeks Growth in more areas!

The retailer will start offering vaccinations for infectious diseases beyond influenza and pneumonia at 2,700 US stores as the retailer continues edging into health-care services.

Wal-Mart said it would rely on patients to provide their own medical histories. The company will also send patients vaccination records to their primary care doctors electronically upon request.