Morning Headlines 5/23/14

Health Site Under Fire, Nevada Alters Path

Nevada will shut down its problematic health insurance exchange and sever ties with Xerox, the contractor responsible for its development. Nevada will rely on Healthcare.gov for next year’s enrollment period and then will evaluate whether it wants to spend more money developing a new state level exchange for the following year.

Finding the Missing Link for Big Biomedical Data

Harvard physicians publish a JAMA article suggesting that big data could accurately discern a picture of individual patient health if it were technically possible, and socially acceptable, to combine disparate data sources, such as EHR data, claims data, census data, social media data, and credit card transaction data, at the individual patient level.

U.S. Senate Drives a Stake Through Heart of Patent Reform

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) withdraws the widely supported Innovation Act, a much-needed patent reform bill, because of concerns that the bill went to far in removing patent protections and would end up hurting the businesses and academic research centers that rely on patents to protect genuine discoveries.

AHRQ: 2014 Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture

AHRQ surveys 653 US hospitals and finds that 81 percent report strong teamwork at the unit level, but 53 percent reported that important patient safety information was not always conveyed when patients were transferred to new units or during shift change. Only 55 percent reported that their hospital’s had adequate staff to deliver quality care. Small hospitals (6-24 beds) scored higher on the survey than large hospitals (400+ beds)