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Daily Rounds: Caritas Parent Goes National; Resilient Menino On Health Costs; Fever Phobia

Caritas parent aims to go national — boston.com
SAN FRANCISCO — "Steward Health Care System chief executive Ralph de la Torre, making his debut at the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, told investors this morning that he plans to take his company's Massachusetts cluster of community hospitals national. "Our national model is really about replicating our regional model and keeping a very small centralized structure," he said. De la Torre said Steward is building a model of lower-cost, high-volume patient care that is much different from larger hospital organizations such as Massachusetts General Hospital, Cleveland Clinic, and Mayo Clinic." (Boston Globe)

Energized Menino pushes for Hub’s ‘recovery’ in 2011 - BostonHerald.com
"...The mayor also used his speech to push for cuts to city workers’ health-care costs, which will soar to $300 million this year. Hub taxpayers foot 82 percent of municipal workers’ health insurance while statewide taxpayers pick up just 67 percent of the cost. “In this economy, it’s tough enough for our neighbors to cover their own health-care costs. We should not ask them to cover the vast majority of ours,” the mayor said, signaling that health care contribution hikes will be a top priority in upcoming union negotiations." (Boston Herald)

LIfting A Veil Of Fear To See A Few Benefits Of Fever
"Fever can indeed be scary, and any fever in an infant younger than 3 months is cause for major concern because of the risk of serious bacterial infections. But in general, in older children who do not look very distressed, fever is positive evidence of an active immune system, revved up and helping an array of immunological processes work more effectively. Of course, that may not be reassuring to a parent whose child’s temperature is spiking at midnight. (Fevers tend to go up in the late afternoon and evening, as do normal body temperatures.) In 1980, Dr. Barton D. Schmitt, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, published a now classic article about what he termed 'fever phobia.'"  (nytimes.com)

Single, Self-Employed And Without Insurance? Get Married And Hire The Spouse : Shots - Health News Blog : NPR (npr.org)

Medical News: Nursing Home Closures Take Heavy Toll in Poor Areas - in Geriatrics, General Geriatrics from MedPage Today "The hardest hit communities with multiple closures were often those with the greatest concentration of racial and ethnic minority populations and poverty," Feng and co-authors reported online ahead of print in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Hundreds of nursing homes close each year — a troubling issue given that demographic research predicts an increased need for long-term care as the U.S. population ages." (medpagetoday.com)

This program aired on January 12, 2011. The audio for this program is not available.

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