Patient Care

The United States will need an additional 52,000 primary care doctors to cope with population growth, newly insured people and an aging population, a group of researchers has forecast. The researchers -- from several institutions including Georgetown University and the Robert Graham Center, Policy Studies in Family Medicine and Primary Care, Washington, D.C. - looked at several factors to come up with their total. Others have projected different numbers but agree that there will be a shortage of doctors.

Following a patient lawsuit filed last month, California officials say they are reviewing whether HealthCare Partners and its medical groups are in compliance with state law. The California Department of Managed Health Care said Monday that it is "reviewing the allegations that HealthCare Partners is operating as a health plan without a license. " Last month, patient Juan Carlos Jandres sued HealthCare Partners in Los Angeles County Superior Court, accusing it of violating state law by managing patient care without the necessary government license under the Knox-Keene Act. A spokesman for HealthCare Partners said the company is "in full compliance with state and federal law. " In May, kidney dialysis giant DaVita Inc. agreed to acquire Torrance-based HealthCare Partners for $4.42 billion in cash and stock.

Los Angeles billionaire and healthcare entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong has partnered with insurer Blue Shield of California to accelerate medical breakthroughs to doctors in an effort to improve patient care and reduce costs. Soon-Shiong, a former UCLA surgeon and drug company executive, announced the agreement between his company NantHealth and Blue Shield, a nonprofit insurer with 3.3 million customers in California. They will partner with St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica to create a "continuous learning center" to work on spreading personalized medicine and best practices to more healthcare providers.

Until now, doctors have pretty much called the shots in the doctor-patient relationship. But change is on the way. Patients, say ahhhhh - it's about to be all about you. The new approach is called patient-centered care, and it's a very good thing, according to Dr. James Rickert, the founder and president of the Society for Patient Centered Orthopedics in Bedford, Ind. "It will mean better outcomes, more satisfied patients and lower costs," he...

Nonprofit insurer Blue Shield of California said it resolved a lengthy contract dispute with UCLA and other UC system hospitals over reimbursements for patient care. Effective Sept. 1, Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and the Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center and Orthopaedic Hospital will be back in the Blue Shield network. The San Francisco health insurer said this new contract with all UC providers statewide runs through June 30, 2015. The previous contract expired Dec. 31 as the two sides bickered over rising medical costs.

A consultant who led the troubled effort to overhaul California's public psychiatric hospitals has played a lead role in federal reforms in at least five other states, where critics have raised similar concerns about cronyism and the quality of his work. Nirbhay Singh, a psychologist from Virginia, abruptly resigned from his California post last year after The Times asked state officials about rising violence in the hospitals and the state's hiring of Singh's family members. State mental health officials are now eliminating treatment approaches and elaborate paperwork that Singh imposed in a costly effort to satisfy a legal settlement between the state and the U.S. Department of Justice.

State regulators have fined six Southern California hospitals for healthcare violations that included an emergency room nurse's sexual assault on a patient at Chapman Medical Center in Orange. The penalties, announced Friday by the California Department of Public Health, included the eighth assessed on Southwest Healthcare System in Murrieta, which has been fined more often than any other hospital in the state since financial penalties were adopted in 2007. Southwest's latest administrative fine of $100,000, the largest the state can impose, involved a nurse's failure to recognize and take emergency action to deal with signs of fetal distress during a patient's labor.

Diane Rodrigues sang, prayed and bounced on her bed during the night at Metropolitan State Hospital. A nurse assigned to keep her under constant watch sat by, occasionally dozing. By 7 a.m., the 52-year-old psychiatric patient was lying motionless on the floor, her neck broken. It took at least an hour for caregivers at the Norwalk mental hospital to glean the extent of her injuries. It took four more hours to send her to a trauma center for treatment. Rodrigues, a former kindergarten teacher, was left paralyzed after the November 2009 accident and died six months later from related respiratory complications.

Orange County and Ventura outpaced Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Bakersfield in a national score card looking at how area hospitals, doctors and insurance companies manage patient care and costs. The Commonwealth Fund, a New York foundation that studies the U.S. healthcare market, ranked 306 communities nationwide on key areas of health system performance, such as whether patients are getting timely preventive care and avoiding unnecessary hospital stays and whether healthcare is affordable.

In a bid to make cancer immunotherapy more effective, researchers report they have succeeded in halting the progress of aggressive melanoma in its tracks - at least briefly - in seven patients treated with an army of cloned cancer-fighting immune cells. In one of those patients, the treatment resulted in complete remission of his metastatic melanoma and evidence that his immune system stands ready to fight any return of the cancer after three years. The study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, contributes to hopes that a tumor-fighting strategy called immunotherapy can slow, halt or even reverse the growth of a range of cancers - and do so with fewer dangerous side effects.