Healthcare groups use ads to lobby lawmakers on Medicare bill

July 03 2008 | McKnight’s Long Term Care News

Congress may be on break this week, but two industry groups launched ads spurring the Senate to take action on a Medicare bill that affects nursing home residents and other older adults when it returns from the Fourth of July recess.

The American Medical Association unveiled an advertising campaign to encourage passing the bill, H.R. 6331. Targeted towards opponents of the legislation, the ads say the issue boils down to a choice: insurance company profits, or seniors and disabled vets who will lose their access to healthcare. Meanwhile, insurance lobbyists are working on their own anti-H.R. 6331 advertising blitz. They argue that the cuts to Medicare Advantage plans that would fund the bill would limit choices, reduce benefits and pass on higher costs to seniors.

This week, two harmful actions went into effect: the expiration of the exceptions process for Part B outpatient therapy caps, and a freeze on Medicare physician payments. Therapy caps, which affect nursing home residents, impose a $1,810 limit on physical therapy and speech therapy combined and $1,810 on occupational therapy for nursing home residents. Residents in Medicare-certified beds at a skilled nursing facility will not have therapeutic services covered past $1,810, according to a note from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Others who exceed the cap, however, may obtain medically necessary therapy services at a hospital.

 

EDS unit to process Medicare claims in four states

07/02/08 — 01:37 PM
By David Hubler | Washington Technology

NHIC Corp. will process Medicare payment claims from health care providers in four Northwestern states under a $148 million contract from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The contract, which has a one-year base period and four one-year options, will serve about 54,000 physicians and health care practitioners and 233 hospitals in Alaska, Idaho, Oregon and Washington state.

NHIC, a subsidiary of EDS Corp., will provide a variety of administrative functions for hospitals, skilled nursing facilities and physicians in those states and will be the providers’ first point of contact for processing and payment of Medicare Parts A and B fee-for-service claims.

The company will also handle appeals, audits and reimbursements, provider enrollment, educational outreach, print and mail services, financial and accounting services, contact-center support, electronic data exchange, mailroom operations, and medical and utilization reviews.

The contract will help CMS meet the requirements of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, which requires the agency to transition Medicare fee-for-service claims from fiscal intermediaries and carriers to Medicare administrative contractors, NHIC said in a statement.

NHIC is one of the largest Medicare Part B contractors in the country, serving more than 150,000 health care providers in California, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont.

EDS, of Plano, Texas, ranks No. 10 on Washington Technology’s 2008 Top 100 list of the largest federal government prime contractors.

 

Medicare Payment Fiasco Causes Delay in Claims Processing

Action Should Not Mean Delayed Payments

By James Arvantes | AAFP News Now
7/1/2008

The Bush administration has announced it will delay the processing, but not necessarily the payment, of Medicare claims to give Congress more time to pass a bill blocking a 10.6 percent reduction in the Medicare payment rate. However, the administration’s action should not result in delayed Medicare payments to physicians, said Kent Moore, the AAFP’s manager of health financing and delivery systems.

CMS is required by law to hold Medicare claims it receives for 14 days before issuing payment on the claims. In normal circumstances, the agency starts to process claims within a few days of receiving them, paying them by the end of the 14-day time frame, Moore said. CMS now plans to hold Medicare claims for 10 business days before processing them to give Congress more time to pass Medicare payment legislation that is expected to negate a 10.6 percent payment cut effective July 1.

“CMS will use that 14-day window they have statutorily and refrain from processing the claim,” Moore said. “Instead of processing (a claim) at the front end of that 14 days, they will process it 10 days later on the hope that Congress will act within the first days of July,” said Moore. “Physicians should not see a delay in payment,” he added.

In late June, the House overwhelming passed an 18-month Medicare physician payment bill that would have prevented the 10.6 percent reduction scheduled for the remainder of this year, along with a 5.4 percent cut scheduled for 2009. But the Senate failed to pass the legislation, allowing the 10.6 percent cut to take effect on July 1. Congress adjourned for a weeklong July 4 recess on June 27 and will return on July 7. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., in a prepared statement, said the Senate would address the Medicare legislation shortly after returning from the July 4 break.

Many physicians, meanwhile, are upset and angry, said Moore, thinking CMS will withhold Medicare payments, a perception that he characterizes as a misunderstanding.

“CMS is simply saying that they are going to take advantage of the 14-day payment floor they already have by law,” Moore said. “They still intend to pay claims in a timely manner.”

Although physicians will experience a reduction in their Medicare payment levels if Congress and the Bush administration cannot agree on a Medicare payment bill by mid-July, there is an expectation that they will agree on a payment bill by then and will make the legislation retroactive to July 1.

CMS has said that physicians should submit their Medicare claims for services on or after July 1 using the pre-July 1 scheduled amount. Claims submitted after June 30 that reflect the 10.6 percent reduction will be paid based on that amount, and “will likely require providers to resubmit a revised claim,” said CMS in a June 30 press release.

Submitting claims with pre-July 1 amounts “will facilitate reprocessing of the claims by CMS, if needed, and will ensure that physicians are able to collect the full pre-July 1 allowed amount, when or if the cut is retroactively negated,” said Moore.

However, noted Moore, “physician practices may only collect copayments and deductibles from Medicare beneficiaries based on the reduced (Medicare) rate, even if they are charging the pre-July 1 rate to Medicare.”

Physician practices wishing to avoid confusion may choose to hold their Medicare claims in-house until it becomes clear that new legislation will be enacted or until cash flow becomes a problem, said Moore. “This will reduce the need for (physicians) to reconcile two payments — the initial claim and the reprocessed claim — and it will simplify physician billings of beneficiary co-insurance and payment calculations for payers that are secondary to Medicare,” said Moore.

 

Medical Transcription in India: A challenging career option!

Upendra Singh | MyNews.in
1/7/2008, 7:04:10 PM(IST)

Medical Transcription is one of the fastest growing fields in health care business in Western countries, especially in the US where the entire healthcare industry is based on insurance, and detailed medical documents are needed for processing insurance claims. Therefore, the hospitals and doctors avail medical transcription services to cater with the demands of documental records, basically outsourcing the business. In the last few years, India has shown an unprecedented success in this field of medical transcription cashing in on the outsourced business from US and other western countries.

Medical Transcription provides an exciting and challenging job option with an ever expanding knowledge based career. It is the process whereby a medical transcriptionist has to accurately and swiftly transcribe medical records dictated by doctors and their associates comprising of history and physical reports, clinical notes, office visit notes, operative reports, consultation notes, discharge summaries, official letters, psychiatric evaluations, laboratory reports, x-ray and MRI reports and pathology reports. A medical transcriptionist is a person who carries out the process of converting the voice format of medical data into text data.

The data is received in the form of digital data files and voice data files and converted into text format in the process of transcription. There are certain prerequisites to convert those voice files into text documents which basically involve transcription and editing. To ensure maximum accuracy, the editing part of the transcribed files include quality checking, visual proofreading, spelling checks, grammatical corrections, rephrasing to streamline the context, and removal of inconsistencies and illogical content so that the desired accuracy of at least 98% is met before being uploaded back to the clients.

India provides an ideal locale for conducting medical transcription work with a large population of educated English speaking people, a large pool of IT professionals, the internet revolution, and the computer-savvy new generation aided by free market policy. Advancement in technology has tremendously metamorphosed the global economy and work place and the field of medical transcription has undergone tremendous progress because of constant advances in communication and Internet technology. Majority of the work is outsourced from US, but even British and Australian doctors are beginning to consider India as a possible source of getting this work done-quickly and efficiently.

Outsourcing of medical transcription work to India has the direct and immediate advantage of cost reduction, reliability in turnaround time, and total document security. The comparative low cost in India to those of US or other developed countries serves as an encouragement for companies abroad to outsource their work to the Indian Medical Transcription field thereby making India to be one of the top destinations of medical transcription industry. Turnaround time is critical in this industry, and India, because of its advantageous time zone in comparison to America and Europe, holds the advantage of delivering the work the very next working day for them.

India witnessed a boom in medical transcription field a few years back with a plethora of companies and training institutes mushrooming all over the place, but due to lack of training, experience and planning, most of them went into oblivion. Those who augured well with this new concept of business still persist and are providing job opportunities to thousands. The success of the surviving companies is a kind of indication that medical transcription, if handled appropriately, has the capability of creating opportunities and maneuvering the Indian job scenario to an extent.

Transcription services in India range from small, one-person home-based businesses to sophisticated, high-tech IT enabled corporations which employ transcriptionist on well paid pay rolls. In the metros and major cities, many big business names have ventured into this field and are flourishing and expanding day in and day out. Most of the bigger companies prefer to have in-house training programs so as to cater with the demand and curb down the effects of growing attrition rate. Some medical transcription firms even get their work done by employing on-site as well as home-based medical transcription basis.

It is not a cake walk for Indian companies in this field to compete with the medical transcription professionals of the western nations who seem to enjoy all the advantages of language and backdoor environment. Every now and then there is an anti outsourcing voice raised for the work outsourced to India and trying to bring out faults in the work done here. At the same time, Indian industry is pitted against some new developing destinations like China, Philippines, Sri Lanka and others who are eager to fight out with Indian dominance. But still India enjoys an upper hand with its efficient work force and competency which augurs well with the high demanding western world. Ultimately, what matters most is the honest work, truthfulness, and diligence which would win against all odds!

 

Sheriff: It’s highly unlikely thieves accessed personal information

July 2, 2008
KSL team coverage | ksl.com

A tip led authorities to stolen medical billing records and to the arrest of the men behind it. That’s reassuring news for the million and a half patients affected by the theft, but is their personal information safe?

Authorities are confident the suspects did not access confidential information, even though they knew early on, from media coverage, what was in those stolen tapes. A $1,000 reward was just too much for one of their friends to keep quiet about it.

Sheriff Jim Winder said, “The criminal element in this case is a circle, and within that circle, fortunately, there was someone willing to contact us.”

A phone call Monday night led authorities to the missing records and to the suspects. Sheriff’s deputies arrested 37-year-old Shadd Hartman on one count of possession of stolen property and one count of unlawful possession of another’s ID.

Fifty-two-year-old Thomas Howard Anderson was arrested on one count of theft by receiving and one count of identity fraud. A third suspect is in jail on unrelated charges.

“These were individuals with substantial criminal histories that found an opportunity and did take these tapes,” Winder said.

Investigators say last month one of the suspects randomly broke into the SUV with the records inside. The vehicle belongs to a courier for an offsite storage company. That courier broke policy by taking the records to his Kearns home.

The records contained information for 1.5 million University of Utah Hospitals and Clinics patients, including Jenni Todd. She said, “I’m glad they found it. I’m glad that they found the records and arrested some people.”

But Todd says, she’s still a little concerned. “It almost scares me more because if there’s a ring of people, maybe they were really trying to steal our identities,” she said.

But authorities don’t believe any patient information was compromised. They say the suspects didn’t have the means or the knowledge to access them. “They definitely are not techies. There’s no question about that. I don’t know if they could find their rear ends with both hands,” Winder said.

But the U isn’t taking any chances. IT plans to work with the FBI to determine if any patients’ records are at risk. The U is still offering free credit monitoring for a year.

Jenni Todd plans to take advantage of it. She said, “Just to make sure, and it’s also just good to have credit monitoring anyway.”

The U has spent $2 million to notify affected patients and offer services. University Health Care says until the FBI verifies through forensic testing that the personal information was not accessed, the hospital will keep current safety measures in place.

“We take our patient confidentiality information very seriously, and so that’s currently in place. And we’ll continue to work with law enforcement officials to determine whether there’s any risk of that information having been accessed,” said David Entwistle, CEO of University Hospitals and Clinics.

University Health Care has also released a statement on the recovery of the records. Two class-action lawsuits have been filed in this case.

The KSL Team:

E-mail: syi@ksl.com
E-mail: corton@ksl.com
E-mail: mgiauque@ksl.com

 

California sues over practice of ‘balance billing’

The Associated Press

Article Launched: 07/02/2008 06:19:19 AM PDT

SANTA ANA, Calif.—California has sued one of the state’s largest hospital operators to stop the company from billing privately insured patients for balances on medical services not paid by the insurer.The practice—known as “balance billing—is becoming increasingly common in California. The Department of Managed Health Care has banned balance billing, but regulations aren’t expected to take effect until the fall, at the earliest.

That agency’s director, Cindy Ehnes, said Prime Healthcare Services Inc. is “the largest example of this egregious practice we’ve seen to date, and it must be stopped.”

Ehnes’ agency filed a lawsuit Friday in Orange County Superior Court against Prime Healthcare. The suit seeks to prohibit the Victorville-based company from billing patients for unpaid medical bills Prime contends insurers owe.

“Consumers who have purchased health coverage in good faith deserve to know that it will cover them in a medical emergency and not result in crushing medical debt,” Ehnes told the Los Angeles Times.

Prime acknowledged it has been billing thousands of patients the unpaid portions of their bills. The company contends it can legally do so—and that it wouldn’t have to if insurers paid their full portion of medical claims.

Prime has 12 hospitals in Southern California and has acquired all but one of its properties in the past four years.

The Times reported that when Prime takes over a hospital, it often cancels insurance contracts, allowing it to charge higher rates. Insurers contend they had begun sending Prime only partial payments on members’ bills.This spring, Kaiser Permanente sued Prime to prohibit the company from billing more than 5,000 of its members for unpaid bills. A temporary injunction prevents Prime from such billing until the case is resolved.

 

Process Improvement, not Cost Savings, Drives India’s Domestic BPO Biz

Posted by Ann All on July 2, 2008 at 3:58 pm | IT Business Edge

Earlier this year, I wrote about India’s burgeoning domestic market for outsourcing. The demand for BPO appears especially strong, as I wrote last August.

Although the forecasts I cited in these posts were optimistic, they now look downright conservative in light of more recent statistics included in this Knowledge@Wharton India article.

The domestic BPO market was worth $1.1 billion in 2007, up from $100 million in 2002, and is now estimated at $1.6 billion to $1.8 billion, notes the article. According to a report by The Everest Group and India’s National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom), the market could be worth up to $20 billion over the next five years.

BPO providers do face challenges in serving the domestic market. For one, says outsourcing expert Ravi Aron, a senior fellow at Wharton’s Mack Center for Technological Innovation, banking and other industries normally served by BPO providers are heavily unionized in India, and will thus face resistance. Last March, I wrote about a threatened strike by state-owned bank workers if the prime minister refused to disallow outsourcing.

Like Europe, India is also filled with a diverse collection of regional languages and cultures. Also, unlike their U.S. counterparts, many potential Indian BPO clients lack the kinds of sophisticated technology platforms that facilitate outsourcing. Their processes are labor-intensive and “idiosyncratic,” says Aron, and thus difficult for BPO providers to replicate on a mass scale.

Process improvement is exactly what most Indian companies are seeking from BPO providers. Not as cost-focused as their Western counterparts, domestic companies want to step up their capabilities in hopes of expanding their businesses into markets outside India.

Expected to be especially popular, according to Aron and other experts, are vertical services such as mortgage loan processing and property and casualty insurance. Says Aron:

Many of these specialized services companies have the money, but not the managerial capacity or bandwidth to automate their processes and extract efficiencies.

Since margins are lower in domestic BPO deals, providers must figure out ways to cut their cost structures. Establishing operations in tier-2 and tier-3 cities is expected to be a common tactic. This should become easier, thanks to ambitious government efforts to improve the infrastructure in these areas, which I wrote about last week.

 

Vet Groups to Appeal Judge’s Decision Over VA’s Treatment of PTSD Cases

By Jason Leopold | The Public Record | Published in : Nation/World
Saturday, June 28, 2008

A federal Judge has ruled that he lacks the legal authority to force the Department of Veterans Affairs to immediately treat war veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and could not order the VA to overhaul its internal systems that handle benefits claims and medical services for war veterans.

Two veterans advocacy groups, Veterans for Common Sense (VCS) and Veterans United for Truth, filed a lawsuit seeking class-action status against the VA last year claiming a systematic breakdown at the agency had led to an epidemic of suicides among war veterans.

The lawsuit claimed that some war veterans were turned away from VA hospitals after they sought care for PTSD and later committed suicide. PTSD is a psychiatric disorder that can develop in a person who witnesses, or is confronted with, a traumatic event. Mental health experts have described PTSD as an event of overwhelming magnitude in which a victim’s nervous system is afflicted with intense fear, helplessness and horror. The victim shuts down only to re-experience the traumatic event over and over again. Studies have shown that PTSD is the most prevalent mental disorder arising from combat.

Moreover, the complaint alleged, that a massive backlog of benefits claims had led to serious financial hardships among hundreds of thousands of veterans.

Those claims were borne to some extent by evidence that surfaced during the course of a three-week trial earlier this year.

Additionally, the lawsuit exposed the extent to which the VA went to conceal that information from the public. The federal lawsuit resulted in congressional hearings about the issue and led members of Congress to call for the resignation of several top VA officials.

In an 82-page ruling issued on June 25, U.S. District Court Judge Samuel Conti said that while it is “clear to the court” that “the VA may not be meeting all of the needs of the nation’s veterans…the court cannot find systemic violations system-wide that would compel district court intervention.”

Conti wrote that the appropriate parties to address the matter are “Congress, the Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, the adjudication system within the VA, and the Federal Circuit.”

“The remedies sought by Plaintiffs are beyond the power of this Court and would call for a complete overhaul of the VA system, something clearly outside of this Court’s jurisdiction,” Conti wrote in his ruling. “VCS plans to appeal the Court’s decision primarily on the grounds that the Judicial Branch must enforce the laws of the Legislative Branch ignored by the Executive Branch.”

“The remedies to the problems, deficiencies, delays and inadequacies complained of are not within the jurisdiction of this Court. Congress has bestowed district courts with limited jurisdiction. Congress has specifically precluded district courts from reviewing veterans’ benefits decisions and has entrusted decisions regarding veterans’ medical care to the discretion of the VA Secretary. The broad injunctive relief that Plaintiffs request is outside the scope of this Court’s jurisdiction,” he added.

Paul Sullivan, the executive director of Washington, D.C.-based Veterans for Common Sense, said his organization and Veterans United for Truth would immediately appeal the ruling.

“This ruling will only cause us to redouble our efforts and our pursuit of justice for our nation’s veterans,” Sullivan said. “We will not rest until our job is finished.”

Gordon Erspramer, the lead attorney representing the veterans advocacy groups, said if the decision is upheld on appeal it “would suggest that veterans have no enforceable rights in America, and the Constitution does not apply to veterans.”

“For all Americans, the implications of this decision are profoundly disturbing,” Erspamer said.

Sullivan said that as of June 2008, the VA has diagnosed 75,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans with PTSD, but the agency has only been providing disability benefits covering the diagnosis to 37,000 veterans.

Early warnings ignored, Congress Slow to Act

Prior to the U.S. Invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the VA issued a report to Pentagon and White House officials saying that it expected that the number of U.S. troops who would suffer from PTSD would reach a maximum of about 8,000.

Sullivan, the executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, told lawmakers before the U.S. invasion of Iraq that those estimates were extremely low. He continued to sound early warning alarms about the extent of PTSD cases and the likelihood of veteran suicides during numerous appearances before Congress over the years.

“The scope of PTSD in the long term is enormous and must be taken seriously. When all of our 1.6 million service members eventually return home from Iraq and Afghanistan, based on the current rate of 20 percent, VA may face up 320,000 total new veterans diagnosed with PTSD,” Sullivan told a congressional committee in July 2007. If America fails to act now and overhaul the broken DoD and VA disability systems, there may a social catastrophe among many of our returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. That is why VCS reluctantly filed suit against VA in Federal Court . . . Time is running out.”

Sullivan has urged Congress to enact legislation to overhaul the VA.

“Congress should legislate a presumption of service connection for veterans diagnosed [with] PTSD who deployed to a war zone after 9/11,” Sullivan told lawmakers last year. “A presumption makes it easier for dedicated and hard-working VA employees to process veterans’ claims. This results in faster medical treatment and benefits for our veterans.”

Yet despite Sullivan’s dire predictions and calls for legislative action the issue has not been given priority treatment by lawmakers. Instead, Congress has continued to fund the war in Iraq.

VA’s Backlog

Meanwhile, a backlog of veterans’ benefits claims continues to pile up at the VA.

The VA said it has hired more than 3,000 mental healthcare professionals over the past two years to deal with the increasing number of PTSD cases, but the problems persist.

In opening statements in the federal court case, Richard Lepley, a Justice Department attorney, defended the VA, calling its network of hospitals a “world-class healthcare system.”

But Erspamer, the lead attorney representing the two veterans groups, said the VA has arbitrarily denied coverage to thousands of vets, that it takes nearly a year to decide whether it will provide coverage to veterans suffering from PTSD, and takes as long as four years to address veterans appeals cases.

“Seeking help from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs … involves a two-track system,” according to the plaintiff’s trial brief. “A veteran will go to the Veterans’ Health Administration for diagnosis and medical care; and a veteran goes to the Veterans’ Benefits Administration to apply for service-connection and disability compensation.

“VA is failing these veterans as they move along both of these parallel tracks. They are not receiving the healthcare to which they are entitled (and where they do receive it, it is unreasonably delayed) and they are not able to get timely compensation for their disabilities, which means that they have no safety net.

“These two problems combine to create a perfect storm for PTSD veterans: they receive no treatment, so their symptoms get worse; and they receive no compensation, so they cannot go elsewhere for treatment. The failings of these two separate but interrelated systems are what this action seeks to address.”

The lawsuit alleged that numerous VA practices stemming from a 1998 law violate the constitutional and statutory rights of veterans suffering from PTSD by denying veterans mandated medical care.

Justice Department attorneys had argued in court papers filed in March that Iraq and Afghanistan veterans were not “entitled” to the five years of free healthcare upon their return from combat as mandated by Congress in the “Dignity for Wounded Warriors Act.”

Rather, the VA argued, medical treatment for the war veterans was discretionary based on the level of funding available in the VA’s budget.

Explosive Emails

Two weeks before Conti issued his ruling, he hauled Justice Department attorneys into court to explain why a crucial email written by a VA official was not turned over to the plaintiffs.

The March 20 email was written by Norma Perez, a psychologist and the coordinator of a post-traumatic stress disorder clinical team in Temple, Texas.

“Given that we are having more and more compensation-seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest that you refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out,” Perez’s email, titled “Suggestion,” says. “We really don’t or have time to do the extensive testing that should be done to determine PTSD.”

Other internal VA emails obtained by the veterans groups during the discovery phase of the trial also revealed that senior Veterans Health Administration officials covered up the rate of suicides among war veterans.

On Feb. 13, 2008, Ira Katz, the VA’s mental health director, and Ev Chasen, the agency’s chief communications director, exchanged e-mails discussing P.R. strategy for handling this troubling news.

The exchange came in the context of how to handle inquiries from CBS News, which was reporting on the surge of suicides among U.S. veterans – reaching an average of 18 per day – with part of that rise attributed to soldiers returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In an e-mail headlined “Not for the CBS News Interview Request,” Katz notified Chasen that the VA had identified some 1,000 suicide attempts per month among war veterans treated by the VA.

“Shh!” Katz wrote to Chasen. “Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?”

Chasen responded to Katz with suggestions about how to avoid too much negative attention to the data.

“Is the fact that we’re stopping [suicides] good news, or is the sheer number bad news? And is this more than we’ve ever seen before?” Chasen wrote to Katz, adding:

“It might be something we drop into a general release about our suicide prevention efforts, which (as you know far better than I) prominently include training employees to recognize the warning signs of suicide.”

In testimony to the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee on Dec. 12, 2007 – just two months before the e-mail exchange – Katz had stressed the VA’s successes in treating mental health problems and preventing suicides.

He also disputed that veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan face any special risk of suicide.

“VA’s latest data do not demonstrate an increased risk of suicide among [Afghan and Iraqi theatre] veterans compared to the age and gender matched American population as a whole,” Katz said.

Three days after the testimony, on Dec. 15, Katz painted a grimmer picture in an e-mail to Brig. Gen. Michael J. Kussman, the Veteran Health Administration’s undersecretary for health.

Katz’s e-mail said that from the total population of U.S. veterans from all wars, an average of 18 vets commit suicide each day. Katz said the data, which the VA obtained from the Center for Disease Control, showed that 20 percent of suicides in the United States are identified as war veterans.

“VA’s own data demonstrate 4-5 suicides per day among those who receive care from us,” Katz wrote.

On March 20, 2008, CBS News reported that it had obtained an internal VA study showing that 1,784 vets who received VA services still committed suicide in 2005, an increase from 1,403 such suicides in 2001.

Underscoring just how under-prepared the VA was for the number of PTSD cases that would emerge from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, documents released to support the veterans’ lawsuit show that prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq the VA believed it would likely see a maximum of 8,000 cases where veterans showed signs of PTSD.

PTSD Epidemic

In April, the RAND Corporation released a study that said about 300,000 U.S. troops sent to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering from major depression or PTSD, and 320,000 received traumatic brain injuries.

Since October 2001, about 1.6 million U.S. troops have deployed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many soldiers have completed more than two tours of duty meaning they are exposed to prolonged periods of combat-related stress or traumatic events.

“There is a major health crisis facing those men and women who have served our nation in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Terri Tanielian, a researcher at RAND who worked on the study.

“Unless they receive appropriate and effective care for these mental health conditions, there will be long-term consequences for them and for the nation. Unfortunately, we found there are many barriers preventing them from getting the high-quality treatment they need.”

Soldier’s suicide warnings ignored

Chris Scheuerman, a retired Special Forces masters sergeant, testified before a congressional committee in March and told lawmakers of an urgent need for mental health reform in the military.

Scheuerman said his son, Pfc. Jason Scheuerman, went to see an Army psychologist because he had been suicidal.

The Army psychologist wrote up a report saying Jason Scheuerman “was capable of (faking) mental illness in order to manipulate his command,” according to documents the soldier’s father turned over to Congress.

“Jason desperately needed a second opinion after his encounter with the Army psychologist,” Chris Scheuerman testified in mid-March before the Armed Services Committee’s Military Personnel Subcommittee.

“The Army did offer him that option, but at his own expense. How is a PFC (private first class) in the middle of Iraq supposed to get to a civilian mental health care provider at his own expense?” he said. “I believe a soldier should be afforded the opportunity to a second opinion via teleconference with a civilian mental health care provider of their own choice.”

Jason Scheuerman shot himself with a rifle on July 30, 2005. The 20-year-old’s suicide note was nailed to the closet in his barracks. It said, “Maybe now I can get some peace.”

Dr. Arthur Blank, a renowned expert on PTSD who has worked closely with the VA, testified during the federal court hearing in San Francisco last month that multiple deployments are largely responsible for an increase in veterans suicides.

“I think it’s because of multiple deployments, which means one is exposed to trauma over and over again,” Blank testified.

Last update: Sunday, June 29, 2008

 

Medical Transcription: Automation is Driving Growth in Speech Recognition

Friday, 27 June 2008, 06:02 CDT | redOrbit NewsHealthcare automation is driving growth in speech technology, with the leading vendors providing specialized solutions, according to a new report by Datamonitor. Although use of PC-based speech recognition is not widespread, the technology has found its niche in the healthcare market, where automation and cost savings are key drivers.

Tight budgets and the need for accurate patient records are forcing healthcare providers to automate processes with speech recognition. In order to reduce the error rate in diagnosis and ensure that information is recorded efficiently, healthcare providers are adopting electronic health records (EHRs).

By dictating notes directly into EHRs, using speech recognition with digital dictation systems, doctors can update information faster and with lower error rates. Patient information is gradually becoming digitized in order to deliver test results and records more quickly. By reducing the number of illegible handwritten documents and simplifying processes, providers can eradicate errors in diagnosis.

Speech recognition is also being used for medical transcription, easing pressure on transcriptionists and allowing healthcare providers to save on staffing costs. Medical transcription is estimated to be a multi-billion dollar market and speech recognition vendors are taking advantage of this.

Healthcare currently represents 85% of the PC- and server-based speech recognition market. Datamonitor estimates that the market for speech recognition in healthcare globally is worth an estimated $170m in 2008. Between 2008 and 2013 the market will more than double in size.

Imaging is one area in which speech recognition has seen a significant uptake, as an increasing number of radiologists use the technology to dictate reports. Radiologists work in controlled environments using specialized vocabularies to dictate reports that, as they often use repeated language, are an ideal target for speech recognition vendors.

Healthcare is not the only industry where speech recognition is thriving. Investments in speech technology are expected to grow in the professional services, where it can help with legal transcription. The technology is also likely to be increasingly used to assist with language learning in education. However, healthcare will remain the largest market for speech recognition through 2013.

The introduction of digital dictation and EHRs has given speech recognition new channels to market. Speech technology adoption will increase as it becomes more tightly integrated with these solutions to provide a seamless document production process.

Source: Datamonitor

 

Obama for tough stance against job outsourcing by companies

Sridhar Krishnaswami
Washington, Jun 28 | Press Trust of India

Taking a tough stand against outsourcing, the presumptive Democratic nominee Senator Barack Obama said that the choice is between giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas or give benefit to those corporations that keep jobs domestically.

“We can keep giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas, or we can give tax benefits to companies that invest right here in New Hampshire,” Senator Obama said at a joint appearance with Senator Hillary Clinton in Unity, New Hampshire.

“We can have a tax code that rewards wealth and hands out billions of dollars more to big corporations and multimillionaires. Or we can provide a USD 1,000 tax cut to 95 per cent of families in America, start rewarding work and not just wealth, and eliminate income taxes for seniors making USD 50,000 a year or less,” Obama said, adding that’s an agenda for change that we can believe in. That’s the choice that we can make in this election.

“We can allow millions of Americans to work full-time but still not make enough to support their families, or we can raise the minimum wage, index it to inflation, and ensure that hard work pays off in America,” the Illinois Senator said. - PTI