Summary Box: WellPoint to revamp primary care pay

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Updated 11:28 a.m., Friday, January 27, 2012

NEW PAYMENT PLAN: Insurer WellPoint Inc. plans to boost primary care reimbursement and start paying for care management it doesn't currently cover to improve quality and save money. SHARE THE WEALTH: It also will offer doctors an opportunity to share savings when better patient care leads to reduced costs. WHY: WellPoint wants physicians to take a more holistic approach to care, instead of just treating patients for whatever happens to bring them to the doctor's office. It expects this approach to cut down on expensive forms of care like emergency room visits.

Report: Electronic health records still need work

Associated Press Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Updated 11:08 a.m., Saturday, January 28, 2012

WASHINGTON (AP) — America may be a technology-driven nation, but the health care system's conversion from paper to computerized records needs lots of work to get the bugs out, according to experts who spent months studying the issue. At the consumer level, few people maintain a personal health record on their laptop or electronic tablet, partly due to concerns about privacy, security and accuracy that the government hasn't resolved. The report offers a window on progress toward a goal set by President Barack Obama, and President George W. Bush before him, that everyone in the United States should have an electronic medical record by 2014. The government has committed up to $30 billion to encourage this shift, mostly through incentive payments to hospitals and doctors that were authorized in 2009 under Obama's economic stimulus law. "Health information exchange will not occur at optimal levels ... without a viable, sustainable business model," the report said. [...] a federal health privacy law that applies to hospitals, doctors, insurers and data transmission companies doesn't apply to companies that market electronic medical records directly to the public.

Insurer WellPoint to revamp primary care pay

Associated Press Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Updated 11:43 p.m., Friday, January 27, 2012

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Health insurer WellPoint Inc. plans to improve primary care reimbursement and start paying for care management it doesn't currently cover, changes that could give patients more quality time with their doctors. The Indianapolis company said Friday it will increase the fees it pays to doctor practices, and it will start paying for services like preparing care plans for patients with complex medical problems. Some care providers who work with Medicare patients will be able to start forming accountable care organizations this year to coordinate care among doctors, specialists and hospitals to cut down on duplicative tests and medical errors. In these medical homes, primary-care doctors track patients between visits and act as the central point of communication between specialists, nutritionists and others. The longer-term goal is to allow primary care doctors to build a better relationship with other patients, to help them stay healthy and avoid developing a chronic condition like diabetes or heart disease.

Business, social media to prevent babies with HIV

DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) — Business and social media leaders teamed up Friday to tackle the transmission of HIV from mothers to babies, saying the medicine and the money are largely in place, and with the right organizational skills they can eliminate HIV-infected births by 2015. John Megrue, CEO of Apax Partners U.S., will chair a business group that includes bankers and consulting experts and will help coordinate work being done by several governments and other international donors, as well as filling in gaps in the funding. Randi Zuckerberg, who founded RtoZ Studios after leaving the Facebook company that her brother Mark started, will lend the power of social media to increase awareness about the issue, by pulling in 1,000 influential Twitter and Facebook users in an expansion of an earlier social media effort to raise $200 million to fight malaria.

Millions now manage aging parents' care from afar

Associated Press Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Updated 05:04 p.m., Thursday, January 26, 2012

(AP) — Kristy Bryner worries her 80-year-old mom might slip and fall when she picks up the newspaper, or that she'll get in an accident when she drives to the grocery store. What if, like her father, her mother slips into a fog of dementia? Bryner first became a long-distance caregiver when, more than a decade ago, her father began suffering from dementia, which consumed him until he died in 2010. Medical emergencies, problems with insurance coverage, urgent financial issues. Rose has rushed to his grandmother's side for hospitalizations, and made unexpected trips to solve bureaucratic issues like retrieving a document from a safe-deposit box in order to open a bank account. Aides handle many daily tasks and have access to a credit card for household expenses. Evelyn Castillo-Bach lives in Pembroke Pines, Fla., the same town as her 84-year-old mother, who has Alzheimer's disease. Once, she was en route from Kosovo to Denmark when she received a call alerting her that her mother was having kidney failure and appeared as if she would die. A November 2007 report by the National Alliance for Caregiving and Evercare, a division of United Health Group, found annual expenses incurred by long-distance caregivers averaged about $8,728, far more than caregivers who lived close to their loved one.

Oral cancer virus affects 7 percent of Americans

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Updated 06:58 a.m., Thursday, January 26, 2012

Smoking and heavy drinking are also key causes. [...] it was not known how many people have oral HPV infections. Dr. Ezra Cohen, a head and neck cancer specialist at the University of Chicago, said the study provides important information confirming similarities in risk factors for HPV oral infections and oral cancer. Dr. Hans Schlecht, the editorial author and an infectious disease specialist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, said the study provides fodder for researching how some infections lead to cancer and identifying ways to detect and treat HPV-related oral lesions before they turn into cancer. Schlecht emphasized the importance of knowing symptoms of these cancers, which can include a sore throat, difficulty swallowing, ear pain and swollen lymph nodes in the neck.

Gates injects $750M in troubled Global Fund

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Updated 05:49 a.m., Thursday, January 26, 2012

DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) — Bill Gates pledged $750 million on Thursday to fight three killer diseases and rescue a beleaguered health fund whose financial losses have cost it donor support. The Microsoft founder said he is lending his "credibility" to the Geneva-based Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria by making the donation through a promissory note so the fund "can immediately use the money and save lives." A donor backlash over AP reports about poor financial monitoring and the fund's losses uncovered by its own internal watchdog, the inspector general's office, prompted the organization last year to cancel more than $1 billion in planned new spending mainly to expand existing programs. The fund says it has provided antiretroviral treatment to 3.3 million people, detected and treated 8.2 million people with tuberculosis, and given 230 million bed nets to families to prevent malaria over its 10-year existence. Kan also said the fund's "transparency" must be maintained — which includes auditors and investigators in the inspector general's office uncovering and publicizing its own losses — as the fund goes through a series of reforms launched last year after the AP stories. Bland told AP he has hired the London accounting firm RSM Tenon Group to look into internal fund allegations that Kazatchkine, a French immunologist, improperly allocated several million dollars of fund money to benefit charity activities of France's first lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, and firms run by her close friend.

French breast implant firm's former execs arrested

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Updated 12:35 p.m., Thursday, January 26, 2012

Mas' arrest before dawn at a family residence in the Mediterranean resort town of Six Fours Les Plages culminates weeks of speculation about whether judicial investigators would be able to assemble enough evidence to detain him on legal grounds. Investigating judge Annaick Le Goff opened the probe after a woman in the southwestern Gers region filed a lawsuit in the wake of the 2010 death from cancer of her daughter who had received a suspect implant. [...] a complaint by the sister of Marseille resident Edwige Ligoneches, a breast implant recipient who died in November of complications from lymphoma, has been included in the case file — along with as many as 3,000 other complaints by other alleged victims. On Wednesday, health authorities in Brazil said the government will fine private health plans that refuse to pay for the removal and replacement of faulty breast implants sold by PIP and a Dutch company. According to estimates by national authorities, over 42,000 women in Britain received the implants, more than 30,000 in France, 9,000 in Australia and 4,000 in Italy.

Study of freakish mystery illness finds no cause

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Updated 05:55 a.m., Thursday, January 26, 2012

ATLANTA (AP) — Imagine having the feeling that tiny bugs are crawling on your body, that you have oozing sores and mysterious fibers sprouting from your skin. In 2008, federal health officials began to study people saying they were affected by this freakish condition called Morgellons. Sufferers of Morgellons (mor-GELL-uns) describe a variety of symptoms, including fatigue, erupting sores, crawling sensations on their skin and — perhaps worst of all — mysterious red, blue or black fibers that sprout from their skin. Some doctors believe the condition is a form of delusional parasitosis, a psychosis in which people believe they are infected with parasites. Last May, Mayo Clinic researchers published a study of 108 Morgellons patients and found none of them suffered from any unusual physical ailment. Blood and urine tests and skin biopsies checked for dozens of infectious diseases, including fungus and bacteria that could cause some of the symptoms. Though normal in most respects, they had more depression than the general public and were more obsessive about physical ailments, the study found. "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," said Felicia Goldstein, an Emory University neurology professor and study co-author. The agency's expertise is in infectious diseases and environmental health problems, and the researchers saw no evidence of that.

Studies: Avastin may fight early breast cancers

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Published 02:44 p.m., Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Surprising results from two new studies may reopen debate about the value of Avastin for breast cancer. Avastin recently lost approval for treating advanced breast cancer, but the new studies suggest it might help women whose disease has not spread so widely. In one study, just over one third of women given Avastin plus chemotherapy for a few months before surgery had no sign of cancer in their breasts when doctors went to operate, versus 28 percent of women given chemo alone. In the other study, more than 18 percent on Avastin plus chemo had no cancer in their breasts or lymph nodes at surgery versus 15 percent of those on chemo alone. In 2008, it won conditional U.S. approval for advanced breast cancer because it seemed to slow the disease. [...] von Minckwitz said side effects are more justifiable in early breast cancer patients because "the intention is cure" rather than in late-stage disease where cure isn't usually possible. The participants' tissue samples are being analyzed for genes and biomarkers to predict which women are most likely to respond to Avastin. Three other studies are under way testing Avastin in early breast cancer; one is expected to have results by the end of this year, said Dr. Sandra Horning, global development chief of cancer drugs for Roche and Genentech.