Primary Healthcare (ASX: PRY) announced its net profit after tax for the year ended 30th June 2013 jumped an impressive 29% to $150m.
Primary’s Managing Director, Dr. Edmund Bateman, said Primary’s consistent performance and improved balance sheet will allow the company to reward their loyal shareholders with a final dividend of 11 cents per share fully franked, up 83% on last year.
The total dividend for the financial year is 17.5 cents, up 59% on the prior year.
MORE than 3000 Australians a year are suing their doctors or hospitals after medical mishaps.
General practitioners faced the most number of claims last financial year followed by orthopedic surgeons, obstetricians and gynaecologists and general surgeons.
Just over one in four new claims related to a procedure performed on the patient, one in six related to a faulty diagnosis, another one in six were caused by problems with treatment, 2.9 per cent were medication related and 1.8 per cent due to anaesthesia.
Half the claims closed in 2011-12 were for less than $10,000 but 127 of the claims closed were for $500,000 or more. And for the first time there were more claims for procedures in the private health sector than the public health sector.
Which state hospitals have shortest emergency department waiting times?
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare says there were 1700 new and 1700 closed medical indemnity claims in the private sector in 2011-12. This compares to 1300 new and 1300 closed claims managed by the public sector in the same period. It often takes many years to settle a medical indemnity claim and the total number of claims open was 10,300 in 2011-12. On average there was a two year gap between the medical mishap and the claim being opened and it took around three to four years for claims to be closed. Claims associated with incident in public hospitals and day surgeries were more costly than claims associated with private medical clinics,” AIHW spokesman Nigel Harding said.
High cost medical claims almost led to the collapse of the medical indemnity industry in Australia in 2002. The crisis was sparked by a NSW Supreme Court judgment in the Calandre Simpson case. She was awarded $14 million dollars when she was born with severe cerebral palsy after her mother was given an overdose of syntocinon as part of an induction of labour.(The award was reduced on appeal to $11 million). At that time, the $11 million award was twice that of the next highest payout. The Howard Government introduced a $230 million program to subsidise doctors’ medical indemnity costs after insurer United Medical Protection went into liquidation in 2002.
A FIGHT over a plan to create a new regional medical school could become a political issue after the Nationals signalled strong support for the proposal from Charles Sturt and La Trobe universities.
The established medical schools believe they have headed off the proposal, with Tony Abbott reportedly assuring the medical deans that, like Labor’s Health Minister Tanya Plibersek, he has no plans to back the idea.
A NSW parliamentary committee has taken the bold step of recommending cannabis be available in leaf form to ease the suffering of the terminally ill.
Patients with cancer, full-blown AIDS or other fatal diseases would be allowed to possess and use up to 15 grams of dry cannabis.
But they wouldn’t be able to grow their own cannabis and would need to buy the drug from illegal dealers.
Committee chair Sarah Mitchell said people at the end of their life who used cannabis to relieve their pain or stimulate their appetite shouldn’t be criminalised.
The upper house committee is calling on the government to amend the Drug Misuse and Trafficking Act, describing the move as “both appropriate and compassionate”.
Patients would need to be certified by a treating specialist, who would put them and their carers on a register overseen by the NSW Ministry of Health.
Labor MP and committee member Adam Searle said they had heard “compelling evidence” from individual sufferers as well as clinicians.
“The unanimity across the political spectrum sends a very clear signal to the government that these recommendations should be very closely considered,” he told reporters.
The committee – which included Liberal, National, Labor, Greens and Shooters party members – was unanimous in its findings.
“The challenge now is to the leaders of all political parties to come on board with what now is a humanitarian relief effort,” Greens MP John Kaye said.
“This is not going to feed any recreational use of cannabis. We are talking about people who are mostly about to die.”
The report stated its preference for cannabis-based pharmaceuticals but noted only one such product, used to treat multiple sclerosis, was available in Australia.
It also called on Health Minister Jillian Skinner to write to the commonwealth – which governs the regulation of drugs – to advocate expanding the current scheme.
Committee member and Labor MP Amanda Fazio conceded the issue of supply was a tricky area that needed further investigation.
Labor MP Luke Foley said the issue was now firmly back on the political agenda.
Eighteen states in America have legalised the use of cannabis for medical purposes, along with Canada and Israel.
As social media continues to grow as a communications medium, so too does its impact in healthcare. According to a report published today by consulting firm PwC, patients increasingly are turning to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter both to find and share medical information. What’s more, of 1,060 surveyed consumers, 45 percent said that information obtained via social media could impact their decision to get a second opinion.
“Business strategies that include social media can help health industry companies to take a more active, engaged role in managing individuals’ health,” the report authors said. “Organizations should coordinate internally to effectively integrate information from the social media space and connect with their customers in more meaningful ways that provide value and increase trust.”
The report’s authors also found that 33 percent of responding consumers have used social media to find information about diseases posted by other patients; one-quarter of respondents said they’d actually posted information about their health experiences online.
Farris Timimi, M.D., medical director for the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, talked about the impact, specifically of the former, at the ninth annual World Health Care Congress in Washington, D.C., on Monday, saying that social media needs to be grown and nurtured for patients.
“Our patients are there. Our moral obligation is to meet them where they’re at and give them the information they need so they can seek recovery,” Timimi said. “You’ve got to be ready for it. You build it for the patients; not for yourself.
“This is not marketing,” he added. “This is the right thing to do.”
With one-third of consumers using social media for seeking or sharing medical information, 41 percent say tools like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and online forums influence their choice of a specific hospital, medical facility or doctor, according to Tuesday’s report from consulting firm PwC.
“Our patients are there. Our moral obligation is to meet them where they’re at and give them the information they need so they can seek recovery,” Timimi said. “This is not marketing; this is the right thing to do.”
In a survey of more than a thousand consumers, more than two-fifths of individuals said social media did affect their choice of a provider or organization. Forty-five percent said it would affect their decision to get a second opinion; 34 percent said it would influence their decision about taking a certain medication and 32 percent said it would affect their choice of a health insurance plan.
The PwC report follows a study last summer by hospital market research firm YouGov Healthcare, which found that 57 percent of consumers said a hospital’s social media connections would strongly affect their decision to receive treatment at that facility.
Following the release of the study, YouGov Healthcare Managing Director Jane Donohue told FierceHealthcare, “We were surprised that consumers were going to review sites and blogs as often as they are going to the official hospital sites.” She added, “Clearly, any successful social media strategy is going to have to monitor and engage those [review site] conversations because you don’t control them. With your own content on Facebook and Twitter, you have a lot of control, but you certainly need to be engaged in those conversations.”
However, as one reader noted on the story, “This is the kind of research that ends up misleading healthcare managers to go down a strategic path to nowhere. … Social media is a valuable and growing tool for communication, but it is nowhere near the usage deciding factor.”
Even if the studies overestimate social media’s impact on consumer behavior, other experts say it goes beyond marketing.
“Savvy adopters are viewing social media as a business strategy, not just a marketing tool,” Kelly Barnes, US Health Industries leader of PwC, said in a company announcement.
Farris Timimi, medical director for the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, said social media in healthcare is a “moral obligation,” at the ninth annual World Health Care Congress in in National Harbor, Md., on Monday, FierceHealthIT reported.
Laverty pathology 