California Department Of Health Services

The California Department of Health Services disclosed an intent to award its three-year anti-smoking advertising contract to Asher/Gould, the Los Angeles agency which currently handles the business. Last year Asher/Gould created the controversial spot called "Insurance," which the department did not air. The spot suggests the hypocrisy of two tobacco conglomerates that operate insurance units which give discounts to nonsmokers.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration flouted a six-year-old state law by failing to enact a program intended to provide medical care to impoverished Californians with HIV, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge ruled in a decision made public Thursday. Writing that the state "has not fulfilled its statutory obligation," Judge James C.

Anti-Smoking Ad Account Undecided: The agency that will create the $16-million anti-smoking campaign for the California Department of Health Services for the next three years remains in limbo. Although a 12-member panel recommended that the account remain at the incumbent agency, Venice-based Livingston & Keye, an appeal has been filed by the runner-up, Los Angeles agency Davis, Ball & Colombatto.

State health officials fined nine California hospitals Thursday for infractions that put patients at imminent risk of injury or death, including a notorious case at Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital in May in which a woman died after writhing unattended on the floor of the emergency room lobby. Glendale Memorial Hospital and Health Center, Garden Grove Hospital and Medical Center, and Kaiser Foundation Hospital Santa Clara were among the hospitals fined.

Earlier estimates of the prevalence of HIV-positive individuals in California were somewhat high, according to new figures from the California Department of Health Services. Using new population data and limited surveys, the team concludes that 94,300 to 130,500 people in the state were HIV-positive on Jan. 1, 1996. Earlier estimates had projected that as many as 175,000 Californians were HIV-positive in 1994.

Medi-Cal HMO Award Upheld: The California Department of Health Services said it had denied appeals from several health insurance plans of a contract awarded in October to Foundation Health Plan to provide medical services to Medi-Cal recipients in Los Angeles County. The appeal was filed by California All Health, Care First and Tower Health Services. The state gave no specific information on why the appeal was denied. The contract is potentially worth $5.9 billion, the state said.

Lab tests done in a physician's office by unlicensed personnel are more than four times as likely to be wrong as those done by licensed technicians in a commercial lab, says a new report by the California Department of Health Services. The department's Laboratory Field Services division studied proficiency testing conducted last year--in which labs were asked to determine the identity of a prepared sample. Commercial laboratories got the wrong answer on 0.

The California Department of Health Services released $1.2 million in emergency funds Wednesday to deal with what health officials say is the worst measles epidemic in the state in two decades. Among the hardest hit by the epidemic have been Los Angeles and Orange counties, which will receive $300,000 and $112,347 respectively.

Security Environmental Systems Inc. said Thursday it has agreed to pay $325,000 to settle various allegations of breach of contract and securities law violations. But the waste-management company, based in Huntington Beach, said it still has some "significant" litigation issues to resolve.

Advertiser: California Department of Health Services Agency: Asher & Partners, Los Angeles Challenge: Give smokers a good reason to quit. The Ads: This spot in the state's long-running anti-smoking campaign warns that impotence could be a side effect of cigarette smoking. A glamorous woman attending a formal affair exchanges suggestive glances with a debonair man puffing away on a cigarette. Suddenly, the man's cigarette goes limp and the woman loses interest.

People who use only cellphones -- who researchers say are more likely to be younger, binge drinkers, smokers and without health insurance -- are about to have a say in shaping California healthcare policy. All they need to do is answer the phone when the state comes calling. Beginning in September, about 4,000 cellphone-only users will start receiving calls from the California Health Interview Survey.

California health regulators outlined their case Friday against Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital, saying repeated lapses in care have harmed patients and warrant the revocation of its license. The allegations by the California Department of Health Services, detailed in a 32-page document, cite findings from nine inspections between October 2004 and June 2007. In particular, the report said, the hospital has failed to ensure the competency of its nurses and the protection of its patients.

The state Department of Health Services inadvertently revealed the names and addresses of up to 53 Californians enrolled in an AIDS drug assistance program to other enrollees by putting benefit notification letters in the wrong envelopes, officials said Friday. The letters went out Tuesday to recipients in 16 counties, including Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Diego.

California health regulators have cited White Memorial Medical Center for failing to properly sterilize a medical instrument later implicated in a deadly bacterial outbreak in the hospital's neonatal intensive care unit. White Memorial, near downtown Los Angeles, closed its busy neonatal intensive care unit last month after identifying an outbreak of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which sickened five babies. Two of the babies are believed to have died as a result.

Perchlorate, a toxic ingredient of solid rocket fuel that is contaminating hundreds of wells throughout Southern California, would be limited in drinking water under a new state standard proposed Monday. The California Department of Health Services plans to set a drinking water standard of 6 parts per billion, the same as a goal the state established two years ago. The standard, however, would be enforceable, whereas the existing goal is not.

More than a month after Kaiser Permanente announced it was closing its troubled kidney transplant program serving Northern California, only a handful of its 2,000 patients have been officially transferred to programs at two University of California medical centers. After promising last month that patients would be transferred swiftly and efficiently, state HMO regulators acknowledged Thursday that even the most basic parts of the process have proved unexpectedly complicated.

The California Department of Health Services released two long-awaited reports Thursday that raised questions about the progress Los Angeles County has made in promised reforms of the public healthcare system. The reports, each hundreds of pages long, detail the findings of an independent audit that examined 12 broad areas of reform promised by the county in 2000 in exchange for $900 million in federal funding.

This county is more successful at providing prenatal care during the first trimester of pregnancy than any of the state's 57 other counties, according to a new state report. According to the report by the California Department of Health Services, 88.4% of all Ventura County women got care during the first three months of their pregnancies in 1998, the last year tracked. That was enough to move the county from the third spot. In comparison, Los Angeles County--at number 17--had a rate of 83.

State health regulators have found that systemic problems in the kidney transplant program at Western Medical Center-Santa Ana resulted in its "inability to ensure the provision of quality healthcare in a safe environment." Western's kidney program, one of the smallest in the state, performed just 13 transplants last year -- two short of the number required to remain proficient, the state Department of Health Services found.

State corrections officials on Friday blamed bacteria in milk for an outbreak of gastroenteritis that struck 1,300 inmates at 11 state prisons last month. Acting Corrections Secretary James Tilton said investigators from the state Department of Health Services had linked the illness to a batch of milk produced by a dairy at one of the prisons, Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy.