Issues

By tapping into a database of opioid painkillers dispensed in the state, physicians can check patients' opioid medication history, as well as their use of other combinations of potentially harmful drugs, such as sedatives and muscle relaxants, to determine whether they are at risk of addiction or overdose death. "We in the health care profession had a lot of years to police ourselves and clean this up, and we didn’t do it," Kentucky physician Greg Jones, an anti-addiction specialist.   more »

A bill for fiscal year 2016 to respond to Zika virus; establish, expand, and support programs to train school staff to recognize and respond to signs of labor and sex trafficking; establishing a pilot program of developmental nurseries in federal prisons for children born to inmates; increase outreach for women- and minority-owned businesses under the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs more »

"... ongoing scheduling errors, such as incorrectly revising preferred dates when rescheduling appointments, understated the amount of time veterans waited to see providers. Officials attributed these errors to confusion by schedulers, resulting from the lack of an updated standardized scheduling policy. These errors continue to affect the reliability of wait-time data used for oversight, which makes it more difficult to effectively oversee newly enrolled veterans' access to primary care." more »

Bowing to pressure from the hospital industry and Congress, the Obama administration on Wednesday delayed releasing its new hospital quality rating measure just a day before its planned launch. The new "overall hospital quality" star rating aimed to combine the government's disparate efforts to measure hospital care into one easy-to-grasp metric. The new star rating boils 62 of the measures down into a unified rating of one to five stars, with five being the best. more »