Laverty offer iGeneScreen™ testing

Laverty Pathology are pleased to offer women access to an exciting innovation in pregnancy care. The iGeneScreen™ Non-Invasive Foetal Screening test is now availabe.

iGeneScreen™ – For Patients

• Make an appointment with your Specialist O&G, Fertility, Ultrasonologist or other doctor familiar with this test.
• Discuss the iGeneScreen™ test with your Doctor and fill out the request and consent forms.
• The test can be performed from when you are 12 weeks pregnant.
• Make sure that you understand the test and all your queries have been answered.
• Your doctor will inform you of the nearest Laverty Collection Centre designated to collect this specific test.
• Please note: Tests can be collected from Monday to Thursday until Midday ONLY and all collections must be pre booked.
  Please contact Collections on (02) 9005 7000.
• The result of your test will be sent directly to your requesting Doctor within approximately 2 weeks.
• The cost of the test is $1,200.00* and there is no Medicare rebate available. The cost is payable by credit card at the time of your pathology collection. Personal cheques are not accepted.

To download a patient information brochure click here.

iGeneScreen™ – For Doctors

Click here to download an iGeneScreen™ Doctor Information Sheet

Click here to download an iGeneScreen™ Request and Informed Consent Form.

If you would like to be added to the list of Doctors providing this test through Laverty Pathology, please email our marketing department by clicking here  and provide us with your name, practice name, address and phone number and we will include you on the next list update.

iGeneScreen™ is an INEX trademark for the non-invasive prenatal screening test developed by BGI.
Innovations Exchange (INEX) is a leading women’s health molecular diagnostic company focused on the research and development of innovative technology for the advancement of women’s, maternal and fetal health. http://www.inex.sg/

BGI is the world’s largest sequencing and bioinformatics institute for the advancement of genomics research and technology. www.genomics.cn/en

Caps on GP payments bad for patients

THE coalition and the Greens fear some Australians will be priced out of basic health care under reported changes to Medicare service payments.

The Gillard government is tipped to place an indexation freeze on what it pays doctors under a savings measure in Tuesday’s federal budget.

General practitioners now receive a government co-contribution of $36 a visit for each patient.

The $1.5 billion in savings will be used to help fund the DisabilityCare program.

“What that means is fewer GPs will bulk bill and consumers will have to foot the cost,” Australian Greens health spokesman Richard Di Natale told reporters in Canberra on Tuesday.

“People who can’t afford it are effectively priced out of health care.”

Opposition health spokesman Peter Dutton says doctors are unlikely to absorb the extra costs and will instead pass these on to patients.

“At a time when we want to keep people out of expensive tertiary hospital settings and provide good primary care arrangements for them, the government’s going to make it harder to get in and see doctors,” he said.

“If these costs are passed onto patients, they’ll be passed on through higher out-of-pocket expenses.”

Asked about the issue on Tuesday, Treasurer Wayne Swan declined to comment, saying only that one media report was inaccurate.

Spring Newsletter 2012

Inside this issue…

• MELANOMA OR NOT? Avoid distractions
• PEARLS AND PITFALLS OF LABORATORY TESTING FOR ALLERGY
• MANAGEMENT OF PATIENTS- With High Risk Human Papilloma Virus (HPV)

Download the newsletter from the link below:

Spring Newsletter 2012

Liver test could save lives

A new ‘traffic light’ test could make it easier for doctors to diagnose liver disease early on and save lives.

Liver disease develops silently without symptoms, and many people have no idea they have liver failure until it is too late.

A third of people admitted to hospital with end-stage liver disease die within a few months.

Now, a research team from the University of Southampton and Southampton General Hospital believe their test will save lives by catching the disease earlier and allowing sufferers to address their behaviour.

The result of the Southampton Traffic Light Test comes in three colours.

Green means that there is no cirrhosis and the patient is highly unlikely to die from liver disease over the next five years.

Amber means there is at least a 50:50 chance of scarring with a significant possibility of death within five years, and patients are advised to stop drinking to avoid further disease and death.

Red means that the patient has liver scarring (fibrosis) and may even have cirrhosis.

Dr Nick Sheron and colleagues tried the test on more than 1,000 patients, with their progress carefully followed and monitored afterwards – in some cases for years – to assess how accurate it was.

The test, although not a substitute for clinical judgement or other liver function tests, was found to be accurate in severe liver disease.

It could provide GPs with an objective means to accurately assess the potential severity of liver fibrosis in high-risk patients such as heavy drinkers, those with type II diabetes, or the obese.

‘We are reliant on general practitioners detecting liver disease in the community so they can intervene to prevent serious liver problems developing, but so far we haven’t been able to give them the tools they need to do this,’ said hepatologist Dr Sheron.

‘We hope that this type of test for liver scarring may start to change this because the earlier we can detect liver disease, the more liver deaths we should be able to prevent.’

Professor Sir Ian Gilmore, chair of the Alcohol Health Alliance, said: ‘One of the challenges of liver disease, which is rising dramatically in this country, is the silent nature of the condition until it is often too late to reverse the damage.

‘However, minor changes in standard liver blood tests are so common that it is difficult for GPs to know when to refer for specialist advice. This large study from Dr Sheron and colleagues in Southampton may prove really useful for guiding the right patients towards specialist care in a timely way.’

Diabetics living longer

Australians with type 2 diabetes are living longer now than 20 years ago but more sufferers are overweight, a landmark study shows.

The 20-year analysis of Australians with type 2 diabetes revealed they had lower blood glucose and bad cholesterol levels compared to the 1990s.

‘This is the first Australian research to show that blood sugar control is improving in patients with type 2 diabetes,’ head of the Fremantle Diabetes Study Professor Tim Davis said.

‘Unfortunately our data also reveals that the average Body Mass Index for a person with diabetes is now in the obese category.’

Data from the study showed that compared to diabetes patients treated between 1993 to 1996, those treated between 2008 to 2011 had lower average blood glucose levels, lower bad cholesterol levels, lived longer, but were more overweight.

‘These changes are highly significant,’ Prof Davis told an annual diabetes conference this week.

‘The benefits of early diagnosis and more intensive treatment of both blood glucose and cholesterol levels is paying dividends.

‘Diabetes patients are living longer and this suggests that they are suffering fewer heart attacks and strokes.’

Healthcare social media a ‘moral obligation’

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.”

Patients choose hospitals based on social media

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.

Hospitals now using social media to draw new patients

Hospitals are turning to social networking in an effort to market themselves to new patients who seem to be looking more to social media to choose the kinds of products and services they use. Hospitals have ramped up their online marketing campaigns after finding that many patients rely less on referrals and more on social media when picking services.

Earlier this year, a Baltimore television station incorrectly reported that Greater Baltimore Medical Center had been invaded by an armed robber. Naturally, the Twitter-verse was aflutter. After the news broadcast, Michael Schwartzberg, media relations manager of GBMC, sent out a slew of tweets correcting the misinformation. This is new territory for medical marketing. Ten years ago, it was innovative if hospitals had websites. Now, medical institutions are tweeting, creating Facebook pages, making videos for YouTube, and posting photos to Flickr.

In this technology-driven age, consumers are relying less on word-of-mouth referrals and looking more to social-media outlets to choose the kinds of products and services they use—including health care. In response, hospitals have ramped up their online marketing campaigns.

“I think the amount of competition in this direct area affects a lot of the things we do [in social media],” said Betsey Haley, communications and social-media manager for LifeBridge Health.LifeBridge spreads its online presence throughout five different social-media platforms plus its website.The LifeBridge Twitter account and Blogspot blog is updated regularly and provides health care information to patients, while its Facebook page is used as a job and career board. LifeBridge also has its own channels on YouTube and ICYou, an online health video source. “We look at social media as a new and interesting way to communicate with people,” Haley said.

Federal health reform is helping to put patients at the center of their care too, which means consumers will have more options.“With or without health care reform, social media has a relevant place in our landscape of navigating health information and health care decisions,” said Kathy Smith, director of market development for Johns Hopkins Medicine. Hopkins has social-media communities on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. “By actively engaging in social media, we have the opportunity to reach audiences on a platform where they feel comfortable,” Smith said. She said patients are definitely paying attention to different social-media avenues as a way to connect with health care professionals and get health information at the click of a mouse.

“Today’s health consumer is much more mobile than they once were,” Schwartzberg said. Schwartzberg said GBMC uses its social-media platform for media relations, customer service, crisis communication—such as H1N1 updates, community relations, and human resources.

Kevin Cservek, a spokesman for Baltimore Washington Medical Center, said the hospital has a Facebook page and Twitter account that are updated daily. Cservek also runs a YouTube channel, which so far features interviews with physicians about heart disease. A Flickr site boasts photos from various events.

Cservek said social media won’t replace traditional marketing, but it is another avenue hospitals can use to reach patients. At a recent free screening for prostate cancer, Cservek said that out of 100 people that attended, about a handful of men said they found out about the screening on Facebook.

“For commercial brands like an energy drink or a new line of clothing, I think social media has a lot of value,” said Vivienne Stearns-Elliott, media relations officer for St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson, Maryland.But she is still skeptical of the value of social media for hospitals, especially since many elderly and low-income patients do not have regular access to a computer.