Roy Poses writes about the latest posts on Health Care Renewal

Here are the latest posts... 

Quality vs Costs of US Corporate Owned but Offshore Medical Schools

US medical schools, while afflicted with institutional conflicts of interest, and the conflicts of their leaders and faculty, have been one part of the US health care sector that has not become completely overtly corporate.  But it turns out that some of the "offshore" medical schools that cater to US citizens who could not get into American schools (not citizens of the countries in which the schools are based) are overtly corporate, run and owned by for-profit "educational" corporations.  A Bloomberg article looked under the hood of some of their operations, finding very high tuition (that produces substantial revenue), but evidence of poor educational quality.  A guick look at the faculty roster, in particular, the surprisingly tiny list of not always obviously qualified faculty in one school's sole clinical department, raised more questions.  True health care reform would put patients' and the public's health, and the integrity of medical education and clinical research, ahead of the personal profits of a few insiders.
Link: http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2013/09/quality-vs-costs-of-us-corporate-owned.html

Why Trust Drug Company Executives After One Admits Commercially Sponsored Clinical Research Is All About "Competitive Advantage?"

Two US based pharmaceutical companies are protesting - actually suing to stop - a European initiative to make the data from clinical trials more transparent.  Speaking to a mainly commercial audience, an executive of one company asserted the need to keep some clinical trial data, particularly about adverse effects on patients, secret for "competitive advantage," never mind the integrity of the clinical research data base, the need for accurate trial data to make the best decisions for patients, or the promise to human subjects of trial to use the data provided by their voluntary participation to advance science and health care.  See the statement about true health care reform above, but also true health care reform may require transferring control of human experiments from corporations whose products and services are evaluated by such experiments (and who stand to gain from distorting or suppressing data that would be unfavorable to their commercial interests) to people who do not stand to personally gain contingent on whether the trial shows a particular test or treatment to be good or bad.

Link: http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2013/09/why-trust-drug-company-executives-after.html

A New And Quite Perverse Hospital Ploy to Defend Medical Malpractice - Blame the Dead Patient? Two Examples

InformaticsMD discussed two examples, one from the media, one personal, of a hospital blaming a patient and/or relatives for a bad outcome for apparently failing to correct what amounted to bad clinical data within the hospitals' medical records.  In one case, a physician allegedly did not access data that was contained in an EHR, and the hospital asserted it was the patient's obligation to remind the physician of that data.  This seems to be the latest example of a blame the victim tactic used by lawyers defending big organizations against claims of injury.  It appears to show the ruthlessness of the often very well paid leadership of such organizations when defending their positions.  True health care reform requires leadership that would put patients' and the public's health ahead of their own pocketbooks.
Link:   http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2013/09/a-new-and-quite-perverse-hospital-ploy.html