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Other Health News Doctors get the time they crave with patients Systems work with insurance to let primary care providers focus on people instead of numbers. Read more The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, December 21, 2008. The Pain May Be Real, but the Scan Is Deceiving Scans — more sensitive and easily available than ever — are increasingly finding abnormalities that may not be the cause of the problem for which they are blamed. It’s an issue particularly for the millions of people who go to doctors’ offices in pain. Read more The New York Times, December 9, 2008 High costs, poor care rarely lead to hospital shutdown Unlike some other nations, the United States has no federal agency charged with hospital oversight. Instead, it relies on a patchwork of state health departments and a nonprofit group called the Joint Commission that sets basic quality standards for the nation. Hospitals are rarely closed or assessed significant financial penalties for hurting patients. Read more The New York Times, December 8, 2008 Depression linked to poorer diabetes control Depression may make it harder for people with diabetes to keep their blood sugar levels in check, researchers have found. In a study of more than 11,000 U.S. veterans with type 2 diabetes, the investigators found that over a decade, those diagnosed with depression consistently had a higher average hemoglobin A1C level -- a standard measure of long-term blood sugar control. Read more Reuters Health, November 19, 2008 MRSA's toll climbs, but hospital is slow to change In Seattle, Harborview Medical Center's struggles tell the story of MRSA: the history of outbreaks, the mounting casualties, the resistance to change. Four decades after its patients began dying of MRSA, Harborview continues to use measures that may place patients at risk. Read more The Seattle Times, November 17, 2008 How our hospitals unleashed a MRSA epidemic MRSA, a drug-resistant germ, lurks in Washington hospitals, carried by patients and staff and fueled by inconsistent infection control. This stubborn germ is spreading here at an alarming rate, but no one has tracked these cases — until now. Read more The Seattle Times, November 16, 2008 Medicare to Stop Paying for Errors If an auto mechanic accidentally broke your windshield while trying to repair the engine, he would never get away with billing you for fixing his mistake. Today, Medicare will start applying that logic to U.S. medicine on a broad scale when it stops paying hospitals for the added cost of treating patients who are injured in their care. Read more The Seattle Times, October 1, 2008 The Doctor Goes Digital: Health care industry moves to electronic patient record-keeping In Washington state, as elsewhere, the shift to electronic medical record-keeping has been a slow, painful struggle. Tacoma-based MultiCare Health System, the South Sound’s largest health care provider, is a notable exception. Read more The Tacoma News Tribune, August 24, 2008 What's Behind the Whopping Price Tags on the Newest Generation of Drugs The story behind the production of Enbrel, Amgen's popular rheumatoid- arthritis drug, provides insights as to why bioengineered drugs are so expensive. Read more The Seattle Times, August 18, 2008 The Newest Generation of Drugs: Who Can Afford Them? Costs of expensive biotech "specialty" drugs may overwhelm an increasing number of patients and employers, and raise questions about the meaning of "insurance." Read more The Seattle Times, August 17, 2008 Everett Clinic Improves Care While Cutting Costs Most of the public conversation about the U.S. health-care system centers on what's wrong with it -- as it should. Costs are too high, quality of care is too often lacking, nearly 50 million Americans have no health coverage at all, Medicare threatens to bankrupt us, and on and on. Snohomish County isn't immune to any of this, but it is fortunate to be home to some of the nation's most committed health-care innovators. The Everett Clinic, long a leader in finding ways to improve the quality and efficient delivery of care, has the most recent success story. Read more The Everett Herald, August 15, 2008 Doctors are 'in' for Online Evaluation Dozens of Web sites that permit people to rate, review, spin or flame their doctors have sprung up in the past year, operating in much the same way as online services that help people find hotels or plumbers. Patients and site operators say the trend is good for consumers and good for health care. Thoughtful doctors, they say, will provide better customer service because of the feedback, and the bad ones will no longer be able to hide. Many physicians say the reviews are skewed by disgruntled patients and are unfair, pushing some doctors to near-ruin after a single post. Read more Los Angeles Times, July 30, 2008 Paying Doctors to Ignore Patients The longstanding push-pull between Medicare and Congress has erupted again. Last week, Congress, overriding a presidential veto, canceled Medicare’s scheduled 10.6 percent cut in payment rates for doctors, and instead raised the rates 1.1 percent. But this action fails to address the problem with the Medicare payment system, which is not the amounts doctors are paid but the way their payments are calculated. Read more The New York Times Op-Ed, July 24, 2008 Medical Procedures Rated by State's Expert Comparison Shoppers Since 2006, an obscure panel of 11 citizens has been serving as the state's scientific watchdog on medical issues. Its mission: Review clinical evidence on potentially questionable medical technologies and decide whether their track records and costs merit coverage by state agencies. Read more The Seattle Times, July 7, 2008 View Washington Health Technology Assessment Program Rulings UW Medical Center Using Surgical Checklist to Improve Safety The UW is one of eight hospitals worldwide test-driving a surgical checklist the World Health Organization (WHO) unveiled Wednesday. The checklist also includes items from a statewide project, the Surgical Care and Outcomes Assessment Program (SCOAP). Wednesday, WHO officials said preliminary results show the checklist nearly doubled patients' chances of receiving proven standards of surgical care and substantially reduced complications and deaths. Read more The Seattle Times, June 26, 2008 View WHO/SCOAP Surgical Safety Checklist Surgery Checklist is All About the Patient The University of Washington is the first U.S. site involved in a global pilot program to test a surgical checklist aimed at improving patient safety in the operating room. The program launched Wednesday was developed in part by the World Health Organization and looks to improve safety in anesthesia, avoid infections and improve communication between members of surgical teams. Read more The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 26, 2008 Insured Losing Access to Healthcare: U.S. study About 20 percent of the U.S. population delayed or were unable to get access to medical care when they needed it in 2007, up from 14 percent four years earlier, a study released on Thursday found. About 9.5 million more people went without medical care in 2007, compared with 2003, the nationally representative survey released by the Center for Studying Health System Change, a nonpartisan policy group, found. In a striking finding, the survey said although those without insurance were more likely to report going without care, those with insurance had a greater percentage increase in unmet medical needs. Read more Reuters, June 26, 2008 Online Pharmacists Helped More Patients Keep Hypertension Under Control, Study Shows Two-thirds of Americans with hypertension do not keep their blood pressure in check, despite well-known dangers of strokes, heart attacks and other serious consequences. But in a novel experiment, Seattle's Group Health Cooperative found that adding an extra level of care — monitoring by a pharmacist over the Web — significantly reduced the number of out-of-control hypertension cases. Read more The Seattle Times, June 25, 2008 Our Pen-and-Paper Doctors With electronic health records seen widely as a way to make medical care better and possibly cheaper, it is disturbing how slowly they are being adopted by American physicians. If this country does not accelerate the conversion from paper to modern technologies, many of the gauzy promises of health care reform made by politicians and health planners will become irrelevant. Read more The New York Times (editorial), June 24, 2008 Most Doctors Avoid Saying, "It's over." Only one-third of terminally ill cancer patients in a new, federally funded study said their doctors had discussed end-of-life care. Surprisingly, patients who had these talks were no more likely to become depressed than those who did not, the study found. They were less likely to spend their final days in hospitals, tethered to machines. They avoided costly, futile care. And their loved ones were more at peace after they died. Read more The Associated Press, June 16, 2008 Washington Health Foundation Releases 2008 Healthiest State Report Card: State Cracks Top Ten for First Time Since 1999 After spending nine years on the outside looking in – Washington state is back among the Top 10 Healthiest States in the Nation! Washington ranks #10 in an extensive new Healthiest State Report Card just released by the Washington Health Foundation (WHF). Read more Washington Health Foundation, June 13, 2008 Kids And Health: Let's Separate the Child-health Facts from Fiction Dr. Robert Nohle, chief of pediatrics for Group Health Cooperative, rebuts a few of the most common child-health myths. Read more The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 3, 2008 Aggressive Hospital Care Might Not be Best Care When it comes to hospital health care, more isn't necessarily better, says Consumer Reports, which has published a free Web tool allowing patients to compare the intensity of care given at hospitals around the country. More aggressive care can result in an increased risk of infection, medical errors and uncoordinated care, says the report. In the Seattle area, hospitals treated patients much less aggressively than did hospitals in some other large cities, such as Los Angeles, New York and Miami. But the report still showed a large variation here, from hospital to hospital, in the care received. Read more The Seattle Times, May 30, 2008 More Health Care May Not Always be Better: Study finds extra treatment can mean extra risks, costsToo much medical care could be harmful to your health. That's what researchers concluded after examining the nations' hospitals and the care patients receive. Some hospitals and some areas of the country give patients more aggressive care -- meaning more tests, longer hospital stays and more procedures -- than others. And the extra treatment doesn't always translate to longer or better lives. Read more The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 30, 2008 Candidates Confuse the Health Care Issue NEW YORK—Last week was Cover the Uninsured Week 2008—just ask any of the three leading presidential candidates, they know all about it. For them and other politicians, the race to get America's 44 million uninsured covered has focused on just that, coverage, and largely ignored two other crucial and arguably more important aspects to national health care: quality and price. Read more The Epoch Times, May 7, 2008 At the End of Life, a Turn to "Slow Medicine" HANOVER, N.H. — Edie Gieg, 85, strides ahead of people half her age and plays a fast-paced game of tennis. But when it comes to health care, she is a champion of "slow medicine," an approach that encourages less aggressive — and less costly — care at the end of life. Slow medicine encourages physicians to put on the brakes when considering care that may have high risks and limited rewards for the elderly, and it educates patients and families how to push back against emergency-room trips and hospitalizations designed for those with treatable illnesses, not the inevitable erosion of advanced age. Read more The New York Times, May 6, 2008Life Spans Falling for Least-healthy Americans, Study by Harvard, UW Finds For the first time in generations, life expectancy for large numbers of Americans is stagnating or falling as more people pay for obesity, high blood pressure and other chronic conditions with shortened lives. The findings, published Monday by researchers at Harvard University and the University of Washington, show that while Americans are living longer than ever on average, life expectancy is changing at increasingly unequal rates among the population. Read more The Seattle Times, April 22, 2008 Making the Grade: Doctors say insurance company rankings of doctors are based on cost, not quality. Will a new patient charter resolve the debate?Dr. Earl Carstensen says he has never failed a test in his life. So he was surprised when, in October 2006, one of the insurers he works with informed him that his Colorado-based practice had failed to meet their cost-efficiency standards. They told him he was at risk of losing his contract with them. The level of care Carstensen provides wasn't an issue. He ranked in the 80th percentile on the company's quality-of-care measures. Nonetheless the insurer explained that he would have to make some changes in his practice, like cutting down on the length of patient visits, or finding less expensive emergency rooms, lest he risk being kicked out of the network. Read more Newsweek, 4/17/08 Drug Companies to Reveal Grants They Give Doctors For years, the nation's largest drug and medical device manufacturers have courted doctors with consulting fees, free trips to exotic locales and sponsoring the educational conferences that physicians attend. Those financial ties in most cases need not be disclosed and can lead to arrangements that some say improperly influence medical care. Now, under the threat of regulation from Congress, the two industries are promising to be more forthcoming about their spending. Read more The Seattle Times, April 16, 2008 Care, Cost Near Life's End Vary Greatly For chronically ill patients in their last two years of life, Medicare spends an average of $59,379 in New Jersey but only $32,523 in North Dakota. The difference is primarily a result of patients getting more hospital care, but not necessarily better care, according to a new report. Researchers at Dartmouth Medical School say that vast differences in spending patterns nationally point to why policymakers need to focus on volume when it comes to restraining costs — not just on the price of a particular service or on expanding health coverage to the uninsured. Read more The Seattle Times, April 7, 2008 Drug Errors Hurt 1 in 15 Hospitalized Kids: New research method finds far more cases Medicine mix-ups, accidental overdoses and bad drug reactions harm roughly one out of 15 hospitalized children, according to the first scientific test of a new detection method. That number is far higher than earlier estimates and bolsters concerns already heightened by well-publicized cases like the accidental drug overdose of actor Dennis Quaid's newborn twins last November. Read more The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 7, 2008 New Colon Cancer Screening Guidelines Earlier this month, the American Cancer Society and two other groups released revised colon-cancer-screening guidelines that recommend patients get colonoscopies or similar exams that can find polyps, instead of fecal tests, which only indicate the potential presence of precancerous or cancerous cells. It's the first time the guidelines have made such a preferential distinction. Read more The Seattle Times, March 31, 2008 Better Incentives Could Make Health Care Safer, More Affordable With the presidential race in full swing, the electorate, candidates and various advocacy groups view health care as a top concern. Nearly all agree Americans need better coverage, improved quality and more-affordable health care. But rarely do the candidates address a fundamental question: How can everyone, including the currently uninsured, get better care — without more money being spent? Read more The Seattle Times (editorial), March 21, 2008 Health Care Disconnect: Lost in the myriad reform proposals for health-care reform are some of the more practical issues that patients confront daily with their ‘team’ of doctors. Can they feel our pain? Read more USA Today, February 20, 2008Medicare to Halt Payments for Eight Common Medical Mistakes It’s a new way to push for patient safety: Don’t pay hospitals when they commit certain errors. Medicare will start hitting hospitals where it hurts in October, and other insurers are following suit. That has the nation’s hospitals exploring innovative programs to prevent injury and infection. Read more The Tacoma News Tribune, February 19, 2008 Why Patients Resist Colorectal Cancer Screening And How Health Care Providers Can Help A new study shows that health care providers play a key role in the likelihood their patients are screened for colorectal cancer. The findings suggest that interventions targeting both the provider and the patient are needed to boost colorectal cancer screening rates, and in particular must take into account patient barriers such as concerns about payment and worries that cancer will be discovered. Read more ScienceDaily, February 11, 2008 Washington Insurers Unveil New Ways for Patients to Pick Docs: Shared patient feedback and price transparency expected to lower health-care costs in free market As health insurers continue to give their members more online information about the cost and quality of medical services, Regence BlueShield and Aetna are moving this trend still farther forward. Providing such information heartens those who advocate more reliance on market forces, rather than on more government regulation, as the best way to get a handle on the country's staggering health costs. Read more The Puget Sound Business Journal, February 1, 2008 No Kidding - No Bills for Medical Mistakes? A heralded agreement by hospitals and surgery centers not to bill patients for medical mistakes deserves a healthy dose of incredulity. Why were hospitals charging patients for errors that shouldn't have happened in the first place? Read more The Seattle Times (editorial), February 1, 2008 Hospitals to tear up bills for medical mistakes Under an agreement announced today by Gov. Christine Gregoire and leaders of hospitals, doctors and surgery centers on the state, medical providers have pledged to never again bill patients for egregious medical errors known as "never events" — because they should never happen in the first place. The list includes 28 situations ranging from surgery performed on the wrong body part or the wrong patient to foreign objects left behind in surgery. It also covers death or serious disabilities caused by contaminated drugs or devices, and burns suffered in the hospital. Read more The Seattle Times, January 29, 2008 Congress Approves $191,000 for Online Health Services Tacoma-based Northwest Physicians Network has announced a $191,000 federal appropriation to support "health record banking" in the greater Pierce County area. The money will go to the South Sound Health Communication Network, a 501c3 sponsored by Northwest Physicians Network and Pierce County Medical Society. Read more Business Examiner, January 15, 2008 Free Drug Samples Help the Well-Off More Than the Poor. New Study Raises Safety Issues, Too. The free samples of prescription drugs many doctors hand out to their patients are coming under heavy fire from critics who charge that the drugs are Health-care Costs Topped $2 Trillion The nation's health-care bill climbed above $2 trillion in 2006, averaging a record $7,026 per person, according to a government report released today. The report is likely to intensify debate over curbing costs and covering the nation's 47 million uninsured people. Costs increased 6.7 percent over 2005, according to the report by Medicare's actuaries — only slightly higher than the 6.5 percent rate in 2005. But it was still well above the overall rate of inflation. Read more The Seattle Times, January 8, 2008 Even Top Docs Missing Signs of Cancer on Mammogram A new three-state study led by Seattle's Group Health Cooperative shows that even the most skilled radiologists fail to detect 20 percent of breast-cancer cases in diagnostic mammograms — which are done when cancer is suspected and when any tumors would presumably be larger and easier to spot. The findings add weight to concerns about relying on a mammogram, which experts have long said was an imprecise tool for detecting breast cancer. And the research shows that women shouldn't automatically accept a mammogram result — negative or positive — as the final word. Read more The Seattle Times, December 12, 2007 Hospitals Putting Bigger Emphasis on Hand Hygiene Before MRSA -- methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus -- seeped into everyday conversations and the public wondered where the antibiotic-resistant bug would strike next, Washington hospitals were looking at ways to reduce infections within their walls. The solution: Wash your hands. The surprise: That so few health care professionals were regularly doing so. Read more The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, December 7, 2007 Colon Cancer Gets Special Treatment: Researchers Want to Encourage More Screenings for Disease Colorectal cancer is the third-most-common cancer found in men and women in this country. The American Cancer Society estimates that there will be about 112,340 new cases of colon cancer and 41,420 new cases of rectal cancer in 2007 in the United States. Combined, they will cause about 52,180 deaths -- and doctors said many could be prevented if enough people got screened when they should. During the next four years, the Group Health Center for Health Studies will look at how physicians can get patients to screen more often and get follow-up exams. Read more The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, December 3, 2007 Dr. Drug Rep An inside look at Rx detailing and how data mining is used. Read more The New York Times Magazine, November 25, 2007 A Model for Health Care That Pays for Quality Seeing low fees for family doctors as a weak link in the nation’s health care system, some big employers and health insurers are seeking new ways to pay doctors to reward high-quality medical care. Read more The New York Times, November 7, 2007 Mistakes Hospitals Don't Want You To See Over the past year, hospitals in Washington left "foreign objects" in 36 surgery patients. And 21 people got surgery on the wrong body parts. Hospitals have reported such "adverse events" to the state Department of Health since 2000, also including performing surgery on the wrong patient, and medication errors that can kill or seriously harm patients. But now the Washington State Hospital Association says it doesn't want the public to know which hospitals made the mistakes. It contends that a bill passed last year forbids release of such records, and the association has gotten the state to halt disclosure. At least one state lawmaker is vowing to fight back. Read more The Seattle Times, October 23, 2007 View full statewide database of adverse events from 2006 and 2007 Staph 'Superbug' Multiplies Fast, Sickens 90,000 a Year It now appears that a dangerous type of staph infection is probably killing more Americans each year than AIDS. It's resistant to standard antibiotics, and the government reports in its first broad look at invasive disease caused by this superbug that more than 90,000 Americans are sickened by it annually. The drug-resistant germ goes by the nickname MRSA, short for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Read more The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 17, 2007 Alarming Spread of Superbug "A very big deal" A dangerous germ that has been spreading across the country causes more life-threatening infections than public-health authorities had thought and is killing more people in the United States each year than AIDS, federal health officials reported Tuesday. The microbe, a strain of a once innocuous staph bacterium that has become invulnerable to first-line antibiotics, is responsible for more than 94,000 serious infections and nearly 19,000 deaths each year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) calculated. Read more The Washington Post/Seattle Times, October 17, 2007 Health Care: A Basics Gap For those who think the pricey health care in the U.S. is working just fine, a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine should be a heartbreaking wake-up call. The study, which was conducted in part in Seattle, finds that in most instances, insured children in the U.S. aren't getting proper health care. Read more The Seattle Post-Intelligencer Editorial Board, October 11, 2007 Even Insured Kids Don't Get Care: Shortcomings Blamed on Less Time with Doctors Children in the United States do not get recommended health care more than half of the time, according to a new study conducted in Seattle and elsewhere to be published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers found that children are not receiving recommended preventive care and screening services, such as regular weight and measurement checks to make sure they are growing and not at risk for obesity. They also aren't receiving standard care for conditions such as asthma and diarrhea. Read more The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 11, 2007 Health Care for Kids Falling Short The nation's children, including those in the Seattle area, are only getting the right medical care less than half the time they see pediatricians, according to a study of children's medical records in 12 cities, touted as the first comprehensive look at the quality of children's health care. The study found that children are often not receiving basic recommended preventive care, such as preschool vaccinations and screenings of teen girls for chlamydia. And many aren't even getting standard care for chronic conditions such as asthma or depression. Read more The Seattle Times, October 11, 2007 An Unhealthy America More than half of all Americans suffer from one or more chronic diseases. Despite dramatic improvements in therapies and treatment, the rates of disease have risen dramatically -- and that rising rate is a crucial but frequently ignored contributor to rising medical expenditures, according to a report by the Milken Institute. Read more The Milken Institute, October 2007 Workdays Lost to Illness Tracked U.S. adults who suffer from mental and physical illnesses miss work or are unable to carry out their usual activities for nearly 32 days a year, according to a study published Monday. Neck and back pain and depression were the two biggest problems, the report said. Read more The Seattle Times, October 2, 2007 Virginia Mason Recognized for SafetyVirginia Mason Medical Center is the only Washington hospital, and one of 41 in the nation, to be named a 2007 Leapfrog Top Hospital. The title is based on the results of the Leapfrog Hospital Quality and Safety Survey. The voluntary survey was given to 1,285 hospitals nationwide. According to the study, a quarter of the hospitals, including Virginia Mason, fully meet the standard for the Leapfrog Safe Practices Score, which includes implementing procedures to avoid wrong-site surgeries, addressing adequate hand washing for employees, and requiring a pharmacist to review all medication orders before medication is given to patients. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, September 24, 2007 The Doctor Will e-mail You Now: Secure Connections Offer Access to Medical Records, Test Results As rising medical costs and long waits in doctors' offices concern patients, medical systems are looking for ways to make health care more affordable and convenient. Providing e-mail access for patients is a logical step, many say. But if it's such a no-brainer, why isn't everybody doing it? Cost and privacy concerns, for the most part, say local health care providers, many of whom are moving toward implementing e-mail access as part of a switch to electronic medical records. Read more The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, September 20, 2007 Overweight? Blame your ZIP code University of Washington researchers recently found wide disparities in obesity rates among King County ZIP codes. The rates range from less than 10 percent in parts of central Seattle and Bellevue to more than 25 percent in some south county neighborhoods. The strongest predictor of obesity rates wasn't income or education but property values, the study found. Read more The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, September 12, 2007 Health-Care Premiums Climbing Faster Than Inflation, Studies Say Health-care premiums of employers and their workers have climbed more than twice as fast as inflation in 2007 -- to about double their cost in 2000 -- and look to rise at a similar or slightly faster clip next year, a pair of nationwide surveys show. Read more Wall Street Journal, September 11, 2007 High Blood Pressure Growing Among Kids The rate of health-threatening high blood pressure has started rising among U.S. children for the first time in decades, researchers reported Monday, a trend long feared by experts worried about the consequences of the obesity epidemic. Read more The Washington Post, September 11, 2007 Reported Adverse Reactions to Drugs on RiseThe number of serious adverse events and deaths attributed to prescription medications has nearly tripled since the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) initiated a system in 1998 to make it easier to report significant side effects, researchers said Monday. Read more Los Angeles Times, September 11, 2007Patients, it's Time to UnionizeHospitals, HMOs, doctors and drug companies have lobbyists. But who is our advocate? Most of us have been fragmented by demographic differences and the diseases that afflict us. A union is a way to finally create one thundering voice. Read more USA Today, August 15, 2007More Generics Slow Rise in Drug PricesA quiet coup is taking place in American medicine cabinets. Prescription bottles bearing catchy brand names like Zoloft and Flonase are being pushed aside by tongue-twisting generics like sertraline and fluticasone propionate. While the trend is already pinching the profits of big pharmaceutical companies, it is rare good medical news for American pocketbooks. Read more New York Times, August 8, 2007 Sending Back the Doctor's BillEconomists, some of whom are also doctors, say the partisan fight over insurers and drug makers is a distraction from a bigger problem: the relatively high salaries paid to American doctors, and even more importantly, the way they are compensated. Read more The New York Times, July 29, 2007 U.S. Health IT Lags According to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only 1 in 10 U.S. physicians in 2005 were using systems that included prescription and diagnostic test orders, test results and physician notes, which are vital to a complete health information network. As a result, the United States—which had a key role in the creation of personal computers, the rise of the consumer Internet, the mapping of the human genome and using technology to cut costs—lags behind Denmark, the Netherlands and some other industrialized nations when it comes to moving medical records into the digital age. Read more Reuters, July 27, 2007 King County Restaurants Told to Phase Out Trans FatsJoining what appears to be a national trend in the wake of the obesity epidemic, the King County Board of Health told county restaurants Thursday to phase out trans fats and voted to require chain restaurants to provide nutritional information for all menu items. Read more The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 20, 2007 New Rules: Menus Must Say What's In Your MealDespite objections from restaurant owners and food-industry officials, the King County Board of Health on Thursday banned artificial trans fat and required nutrition labeling for menu items in chain restaurants. With the vote, King County joins a handful of jurisdictions in the country to ban artificial trans fats in restaurant meals and becomes only the second to require nutrition labeling on menus. Read more The Seattle Times, July 20, 2007 For Diabetic Cyclist, Spirit is His WeaponDiabetes has taught Bob Heyer a few balancing tricks in the past 27 years. He's learned to ride his bike, prick his finger and check his blood sugar at the same time. His mind computes carbohydrate-to-insulin ratios at warp speed. Multitasking helped the Issaquah man and his team of diabetic cyclists as they pedaled 3,052 miles day and night in the grueling Race Across America (RAAM) ride last month. Read more The Seattle Times , July 19, 2007 Olympia Gives Patients More Say Over SurgeryWashington is the first state that will experiment with giving medical patients more information and say-so about choosing whether to undergo surgery in cases where it's not clear that cutting is the best course. Read more Puget Sound Business Journal, May 18, 2007 Redesigning Care Delivery In Response
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