healths

Rural communities have unique health-care needs: accessibility, a lack of providers, the needs of an aging population suffering from a greater number of chronic conditions, and larger percentages of people without health insurance or enough insurance. On top of that, rural hospitals � many of which are local economic linchpins � struggle with declining government reimbursements and the lack of Medicaid expansion in many states. For these reasons and more, the National Organization of State Offices of Rural Health observes each third Thursday of every November � this year, Nov. 15 � as National Rural Health Day. "First and foremost, National Rural Health Day is an opportunity to 'celebrate the power of rural' by honoring the selfless, community-minded, can-do spirit that prevails in rural America," NOSORH says. "But it also gives us a chance to bring to light the unique healthcare challenges that rural citizens face � and showcase the efforts of rural healthcare ...

By Melissa Patrick Kentucky Health News A nonprofit group that rates hospitals has released its latest grades for keeping patients safe, giving Cs to most of the 51 Kentucky hospitals it rated. Their average grade was worse than the spring 2018 ratings, but Kentucky's overall ranking among the states, based on the percentage of hospitals with A grades, improved one spot, to 33rd, from the spring report. Ky. Health News chart based on Leapfrog Group data and logo The Leapfrog Group , a nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C., rated over 2,600 hospitals. Most of Kentucky's 129 hospitals were not rated, since rural hospitals with "critical access" status don't have to report quality measures to the federal government. The grades are calculated using 28 performance measures of patient safety that indicate how well hospitals protect patients from preventable medical errors, infections and injuries. The study notes that one in 25 patients leave hospitals with a new in...

By Melissa Patrick Kentucky Health News Teens who use electronic cigarettes end up smoking traditional cigarettes at about the same rate as teens who first start with the traditional smokes, according to a recent study based on surveys in California and Connecticut. �The findings show that e-cigs do nothing to deter the amount of combustible smoking in youth,� Jessica Barrington-Trimis, an assistant professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California and the study�s lead author, said in a news release . �On the contrary, they increase the likelihood that vaping teens will start smoking.� The study, published in the medical journal  Pediatrics , is based on surveys of 6,258 high-school students in three studies, including two from the Children's Health Study and Happiness and Health Study in Southern California and a Yale University survey in Connecticut. Participants were re-surveyed again six to 16 months later. During the study period, 7 percent of the st...

A food service employee at the Albert B. Chandler Hospital at the University of Kentucky has been diagnosed with hepatitis A, a highly contagious liver disease, the hospital announced. The employee prepared food at the Pavilion A cafeteria, but was not involved in any food preparation for hospital patients. The hospital advises anyone who ate at the cafeteria between Oct. 11 and 30 to get a hepatitis A vaccination, which requires two shots, six months apart. All food-service workers at UK HealthCare will now be required to get the vaccine, and the hospital will set up "vaccination stations" for that. The Lexington-Fayette County Health Department and UK HealthCare have recommended that all Lexington residents get vaccinated as the number of cases continues to climb. Kentucky schoolchildren were required to have the vaccination at the beginning of the school year. In the current outbreak, there have been no confirmed cases of hepatitis A being transmitted by food-service wo...

Abby Drane Abby Drane has been named Kentucky regional CEO for Centerstone,  a non-profit organization that cares for patients with mental, developmental and behavioral issues. She will replace Tony Zipple, who is retiring Nov. 30. Drane was president and CEO of Uspiritus , which serves abused and neglected youth in Kentucky, and before that was Centerstone's chief operating officer. She has served as chief financial officer for two of Kentucky�s largest community mental health centers,  Seven Counties Services (now Centerstone) and Communicare . Drane earned a bachelor's degree in accounting from Central Missouri State University and her MBA from Western Kentucky University .

Illustration by Ben Wiseman for The New Yorker Electronic health records were supposed to "make medical care easier and more efficient," says The New Yorker . "But are screens coming between doctors and patients?" Yes, surgeon Atul Gawande writes in the magazine's latest issue, starting with a description of his 2015 training session on the Epic Systems Corp. system, which now has information on more than half of Americans. "The new system would give us one platform for doing almost everything health professionals needed�recording and communicating our medical observations, sending prescriptions to a patient�s pharmacy, ordering tests and scans, viewing results, scheduling surgery, sending insurance bills. With Epic, paper lab-order slips, vital-signs charts, and hospital-ward records would disappear. We�d be greener, faster, better. But three years later I�ve come to feel that a system that promised to increase my mastery over my work has, instead, increa...