Every week, veteran healthcare reporter Tinker Ready rounds up the latest news for MassDevice. This week, she takes a look at how Governor Deval Patrick plans to slice the state’s stimulus fund pie, a Harvard doc’s appointment by President Barack Obama and how to stop worrying and love your colonoscopy.
Stimulus package
{IMGLEFT:85×85:http://www.massdevice.com/sites/default/wp-content/uploads/headshots/picture-38.jpg}Governor Deval Patrick, who’s been divvying up the state’s stimulus funds, got around to healthcare last week. At a meeting crowded with doctors and activists at the Cambridge Health Alliance Wednesday, he announced that $764 million will go to a range of health and human service projects. The funds will help bolster the state’s health reform effort and go toward ensuring “the stability of essential health providers” including hospitals, nursing homes and mental health programs.
Earlier in the week, The Globe interviewed hopeful scientists in a piece on anticipation about all the NIH money coming in with the stimulus bill:
E-mails ping-pong back and forth late at night. Scientists click and re-click on websites to check for the latest updates on research grants.
After years of flat federal funding that dimmed morale and stalled basic research, the federal stimulus package has created a frenzy for “lab-ready” science, with a $21.5 billion investment in research and development.
“This is all the buzz . . . a very hot area of conversation. In the hallway, in the cafeteria, this is all everybody’s talking about,” said Dr. Terence Flotte, dean at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.
Obama taps Blumenthal for HIT push
The appointment of Harvard’s David Blumenthal to head up Obama’s HIT effort was one of the biggest health stories out of Boston this week — but not the most surprising. He’s a Harvard name and has experience in both HIT research and politics.
Most of the reporting on his appointment focused on his work on the dissemination of HIT and Blumenthal soon had some fresh research to offer. This week’s New England Journal of Medicine reports on the finding of a team he led that looked specifically at HIT in inpatient settings. Their conclusion: We’ve got a long way to go:
The very low levels of adoption of electronic health records in U.S. hospitals suggest that policymakers face substantial obstacles to the achievement of health care performance goals that depend on health information technology. A policy strategy focused on financial support, interoperability, and training of technical support staff may be necessary to spur adoption of electronic-records systems in U.S. hospitals.
Blumenthal’s also leading an effort to collect information about just how wired the health care system is. His team’s findings will launch the Annual Report on the Dissemination and Use of HIT in the United States.
In addition his research and clinical work, Blumenthal knows his way around D.C. He was on the staff of Ted Kennedy’s Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research in the 1970s. He worked on former Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis’ campaign team in 1988. (At the time, state was experimenting with its unsuccessful effort [PDF] to establish a pay-or-play approach to universal health coverage.)
Blumenthal served on a Clinton advisory panel and he joined the current President in during the campaign.
You can see some of his ideas at work in Obama’s health plan — in particular, the idea that policy makers have to jump right in while the issue is hot. You’ll find more in Blumenthal’s upcoming book on health reform and the White House.
Working with a Brown University researcher James Morone, he read through presidential archives and listened to recently-released tapes of President Lyndon Johnson in the White House. From there, they developed some ideas on what a president has to do to make health care reform happen — or not happen.
Their conclusions come out in hardcover in June: “The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office”.
For a preview, see the NEJM story The Lessons of Success — Revisiting the Medicare Story.
Of a doctor and drugs
Blumenthal has been researching HIT lately, but I got to know his work through his research on industry/academic relationships.
If his Harvard colleagues still working in this area need an anecdote, they could just wander over to Fruit Street, where more details emerged last week about Harvard child psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Biederman and his relationships with drug makers. Liz Kowalczyk of The Globe reports:
The expanded inquiry is based in part on slide presentations that summarize projects at the Johnson & Johnson Center for Pediatric Psychopathology Research, a center at Massachusetts General Hospital that was funded by Johnson & Johnson and headed by Biederman from 2002 to 2005.
Under the heading “Key Projects for 2005,” one slide promises to provide a J&J subsidiary, Janssen, “with critical competitive data on safety and efficacy of risperidone (an antipsychotic) in children” under age 10, while another talks about expanding use of the drug Concerta for teenagers with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Another slide indicates that a benefit of the center is to help J&J develop new uses for its drugs.
In a seven-page letter sent yesterday to Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust and Mass. General president Dr. Peter Slavin, [US Senator Charles] Grassley, a Republican, said he is concerned about the implications of the slides and asks why they “suggest an expectation of positive outcomes” prior to the clinical trials.
The Globe also had a related story on Tufts University administrators refusing to sit on a campus panel about conflicts of interest with one of Grassley’s aides:
Tufts University has withdrawn an invitation for a top aide to US Senator Charles Grassley to give the keynote speech at a conference on conflicts of interest in medicine and research, leading one conference organizer to pull out and question the university’s commitment to academic freedom.
The University-wide Committee on Ethics rescinded the invitation on March 13, according to e-mails obtained by The Globe. The messages said top Tufts officials refused to allow other administrators to be panelists at the meeting if Grassley’s aide spoke, saying it was inappropriate to do so while Grassley is investigating ties between a Tufts professor and the drug industry.
“Accelerator” grants
The Massachusetts Life Sciences Center’s board met this week and reported receiving 88 applications for its “accelerator loan program” for early-stage companies. Applications closed on March 6, and they covered the spectrum:
The applications come from a wide range of life sciences industry sectors. Forty-six percent of applicants are medical device or diagnostic firms, 24 percent are involved with drug discovery, and 14 percent develop technologies that support the life sciences
industry.
Breathless about BI?
The Herald broke a story on a Dept. of Public Health report criticizing Beth Israel for a botched plastic surgery. (Not often do I see “stunning” and “utterly” in a single lead.) This from the paper’s breathless story:
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center utterly failed a Quincy man when an impaired surgeon was allowed to operate on him last summer and he was sent home without proper care, health officials ruled in a stunning reversal of an earlier report….
The first DPH report, finished in September, cleared Beth Israel of providing poor care to Michael K. Hicks, a 40-year-old Quincy man whose botched chest reduction and liposuction left him with scarring, only one nipple and mental anguish….
Beth Israel received the report yesterday and will present DPH with a corrective action plan, said Dr. Kenneth Sands, senior vice president of health care quality at the hospital.
“As always, we welcome the department’s input on how to improve patient safety and the quality of care, and we will work closely with them to address issues they raise,” he said.
Appreciating the colonoscopy
Free cancer screenings for the uninsured for could win BI back some good favor. But it’s not easy to feel grateful for a colonoscopy, even a free one.
Despite the nasty prep and the test itself, everyone should appreciate the procedure: One of the few cancer screenings that is proven to save lives — like my mother’s.
At BI, group of nurses and doctors volunteered as part of a pilot on last Saturday and examined nine patients. A larger screening effort is scheduled for next year.
Let’s all raise a cup of Go Lightly to toast them.
There’s more by Tinker Ready over at Boston Health News.