By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
yahoo.com

Primary care — the basic medical care that people get when they visit their doctors for routine physicals and minor problems — could fall apart in the United States without immediate reforms, the American College of Physicians said on Monday.

“Primary care is on the verge of collapse,” said the organization, a professional group which certifies internists, in a statement. “Very few young physicians are going into primary care and those already in practice are under such stress that they are looking for an exit strategy.”

Dropping incomes coupled with difficulties in juggling patients, soaring bills and policies from insurers that encourage rushed office visits all mean that more primary care doctors are retiring than are graduating from medical school, the ACP said in its report.

The group has proposed a solution — calling on federal policymakers to approve new ways of paying doctors that would put primary care doctors in charge of organizing a patient’s care and giving patients more responsibility for monitoring their own health and scheduling regular visits.
see rest of article

By STEPHANIE REITZ, Associated Press Writer
yahoo.com

Within the next few years, Connecticut patients’ medical records could be electronically accessible around the clock to doctors, hospitals and other health care providers statewide.

Gov. M. Jodi Rell and U.S. Rep. Nancy Johnson (news, bio, voting record) on Monday joined a coalition of health care professionals to announce the launch of eHealth Connecticut, an initiative to store and share medical records over an electronic network in place of today’s paper-based methods.

They say it could help reduce prescription errors, provide better information during emergencies and save money by alerting physicians to medical procedures that already have been conducted and do not need to be repeated.

“It will let doctors and hospitals communicate more rapidly, more effectively, in real time,” Rell said. “That’s what we want, not two-day-old information or having to send somebody back for a different test — real time, right now.”
see rest of article

South Florida Business Journal
bizjournals.com

The nation’s health maintenance organizations reported a 21.2 percent higher profit during the first six months of 2005 than they did for the same period the year before.

That’s according to Weiss Ratings, which said it based its analysis on insurers that filed a National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) Health Statement or a California Health Care Service Plan statement.

The Jupiter-based financial analysis firm said the profits reached $6.98 billion during the first six months of 2005, up from $5.76 billion during the same period in 2004.

HMOs reporting the largest year-over-year dollar increases in profit include:

* Newark, N.J.-based Horizon Healthcare Services, which said it earned $137 million, up from $37.8 million
* New York City-based Oxford Health Insurance, which said it earned $98.1 million, up from $44.5 million
* Harrisburg, Pa.-based Advantage Insurance Co., which said it earned $32.3 million, up from a loss of $12.9 million
* Detroit-based Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, which said it earned $208.5 million, up from $163.4 million
see original

By Michael Smith, MedPage Today Staff Writer
Reviewed by Zalman S. Agus, MD; Emeritus Professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
medpagetoday.com

Barry Bonds was hot on baseball’s all-time home run record last year when knee surgery interrupted the chase. But what orthopedic surgeons do now laparoscopically stem cells may do in the future, according to researchers here.

They say they’ve been able to show that stem cells from muscle tissue, genetically engineered to express a therapeutic protein, can repair damaged cartilage in knee joints – at least in rats.

Damage to articular cartilage in humans is a common sequel to injury or illness, and there is no therapy that completely restores the tissue. But in animal experiments, found Johnny Huard, Ph.D., director of the growth and development laboratory at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, muscle-derived stem cells, genetically altered to express bone morphogenetic protein 4 (BMP-4), were able to repair damaged cartilage in injured knees.

The approach “is a potential strategy by which to improve articular cartilage healing,” Dr. Huard and colleagues concluded in the February issue of Arthritis and Rheumatism.

In an accompanying editorial, Mary Goldring, Ph.D., of Harvard Medical School, said the finding is “proof-of-principle for performing (muscle-derived stem cell) implantation in cartilage of adult humans.”

Dr. Huard and colleagues took muscle-derived stem cells from mice and used a retroviral vector to transduce them so that they expressed BMP-4, which they described as “a promising candidate for the promotion of chondrogenesis.”

In the meantime, they created injuries to the knee cartilage of 12-week-old rats, which were treated with the modified stem cells in a fibrin glue, unmodified stem cells in fibrin glue, or just the glue itself. The rats given the latter two treatments acted as controls.
see rest of article

Child Health News
www.news-medical.net

The report from the March of Dimes says in addition hundreds of thousands more are born with serious birth defects of post-conception origin due to maternal exposure to environmental agents, such as alcohol, rubella, and syphilis.

The report on birth defects, ‘The Hidden Toll of Dying and Disabled Children’, reveals that at least 3.3 million children less than 5 years of age die annually because of serious birth defects.

Another 3.2 million of those who survive may be mentally and physically disabled for life.

It appears that birth defects are a global problem, but their impact is particularly severe in poorer countries where more than 94 percent of births with serious defects and 95 percent of the deaths of these children occur.

In such countries birth rates are also considerably higher.

Dr. Jennifer L. Howse, president of the March of Dimes, says the report identifies for the first time the severe, and previously hidden global toll of birth defects, which is a serious, vastly unappreciated and under-funded public health problem.

Michael Katz, M.D., senior vice president for research and global programs at the March of Dimes, adds that the human toll of birth defects is even greater when the impact of lifelong disability on children, their families, and society is taken into account.
see rest of article