Scarborough nonprofit collects millions of dollars in usable medical supplies thrown out by hospitals
Posted Sept. 02, 2013, at 12:26 p.m.
SCARBOROUGH, Maine — Not far from a bin filled with $25 adhesive bandages, nurse Elizabeth McLellan checked the expiration dates on a number of bags of IV solutions, each one worth about $100 in the American medical supplies market — and as it turns out, each one with a usable lifespan that reaches deep into 2014 or 2015.
Her colleague, Mandy Rodney, hurried by with a newly received $1,500 Doppler ultrasound.
The Scarborough warehouse of the nonprofit Partners for World Health, one of the organization’s five storage sites of various sizes in Maine, is filled to all corners with unopened, unused and sterilized health care supplies. Syringes sealed in packages, linens, soaps and more.
And at the group’s other sites? Almost new operating tables that sell for about $100,000 apiece, along with wheelchairs, crutches and exam tables.
The word used by one first-time visitor to describe this bounty of potentially life-saving medical supplies? — “Sad.”
“I think it’s pretty powerful,” University of New England third-year physical therapy student Karen Bartling said Friday. “There’s got to be millions of dollars of supplies here, and all of it was just going to be thrown out. It’s kind of sad.”
Partners for World Health is a now four-year-old nonprofit founded by McLellan, who gathers the medical supplies from hospitals across Maine with a promise to sort them and redistribute them to areas of need both domestically and overseas.
This year, Partners for World Health will send six shipping containers of health care supplies, weighing between 30,000 and 40,000 pounds and worth between $250,000 and $500,000 apiece, to places such as Bangladesh, Senegal and Cambodia. McLellan said her organization has enough supplies to ship out at least 12 containers every year, but hasn’t raised enough in donations to make that many shipments.
On Friday, Bartling and six UNE classmates spent the morning helping organize the latest hospital giveaways in exchange for a load of supplies for their own purposes. As part of a school project funded by a grant from the university’s Center for Excellence in Interprofessional Education, the students are launching a 10-week program next month to help recently diagnosed diabetes patients in the area properly monitor their conditions and make healthy lifestyle choices.
There’s a lot of good being done both close to home and in underdeveloped countries by McLellan’s efforts to pull medical supplies out of the waste streams of Maine hospitals — in 2012, for instance, Pen Bay Healthcare in Rockport trumpeted that the organization had donated 3,600 pounds of supplies to Partners for World Health and saved $8,180 in waste disposal costs as a result.
But McLellan said the success of her group is a sign of trouble in its own right: Hospitals across the state, many of which are facing financial difficulties, are buying and throwing away millions of dollars worth of supplies.
Scarborough nonprofit collects millions of dollars in usable medical supplies thrown out by hospitals
Posted Sept. 02, 2013, at 12:26 p.m.
SCARBOROUGH, Maine — Not far from a bin filled with $25 adhesive bandages, nurse Elizabeth McLellan checked the expiration dates on a number of bags of IV solutions, each one worth about $100 in the American medical supplies market — and as it turns out, each one with a usable lifespan that reaches deep into 2014 or 2015.
Her colleague, Mandy Rodney, hurried by with a newly received $1,500 Doppler ultrasound.
The Scarborough warehouse of the nonprofit Partners for World Health, one of the organization’s five storage sites of various sizes in Maine, is filled to all corners with unopened, unused and sterilized health care supplies. Syringes sealed in packages, linens, soaps and more.
And at the group’s other sites? Almost new operating tables that sell for about $100,000 apiece, along with wheelchairs, crutches and exam tables.
The word used by one first-time visitor to describe this bounty of potentially life-saving medical supplies? — “Sad.”
“I think it’s pretty powerful,” University of New England third-year physical therapy student Karen Bartling said Friday. “There’s got to be millions of dollars of supplies here, and all of it was just going to be thrown out. It’s kind of sad.”
Partners for World Health is a now four-year-old nonprofit founded by McLellan, who gathers the medical supplies from hospitals across Maine with a promise to sort them and redistribute them to areas of need both domestically and overseas.
This year, Partners for World Health will send six shipping containers of health care supplies, weighing between 30,000 and 40,000 pounds and worth between $250,000 and $500,000 apiece, to places such as Bangladesh, Senegal and Cambodia. McLellan said her organization has enough supplies to ship out at least 12 containers every year, but hasn’t raised enough in donations to make that many shipments.
On Friday, Bartling and six UNE classmates spent the morning helping organize the latest hospital giveaways in exchange for a load of supplies for their own purposes. As part of a school project funded by a grant from the university’s Center for Excellence in Interprofessional Education, the students are launching a 10-week program next month to help recently diagnosed diabetes patients in the area properly monitor their conditions and make healthy lifestyle choices.
There’s a lot of good being done both close to home and in underdeveloped countries by McLellan’s efforts to pull medical supplies out of the waste streams of Maine hospitals — in 2012, for instance, Pen Bay Healthcare in Rockport trumpeted that the organization had donated 3,600 pounds of supplies to Partners for World Health and saved $8,180 in waste disposal costs as a result.
But McLellan said the success of her group is a sign of trouble in its own right: Hospitals across the state, many of which are facing financial difficulties, are buying and throwing away millions of dollars worth of supplies.
With Change Coming, Aetna Targets Employers
By TANZINA VEGA
AS the country marches toward a new health insurance system, insurance companies have spent millions on consumer advertising to position themselves as health care companies.
But because a majority of Americans are insured through their employers, the insurance companies have to reach several audiences. Speaking to human resources professionals, health care providers and policy makers is still an important part of many insurance companies’ marketing plans.
Aetna, one of the largest of the companies, will introduce a new campaign on Tuesday aimed at those groups. It will highlight the company’s goal of cutting billions of dollars of expenditures through so-called Big Data, electronic health records and other technologies as well as encouraging better coordination among health care providers. The campaign, called “Our Healthy,” will run online, in print and on mobile devices through the end of 2013.
“We believe that the health care system is desperately in need of improvement,” said Robert Mead, the senior vice president of marketing, product and communications at Aetna. Mr. Mead cited a report by the Institute of Medicine that tallied more than $760 billion in health care “waste” created annually as a result of consumer fraud, unnecessary procedures and excessive administrative costs.
The campaign was created by OgilvyOne in New York and is an extension of a consumer campaign called “What’s Your Healthy?” that Aetna began earlier this year. Both “What’s Your Healthy?” and “Our Healthy” are part of a $50 million advertising and marketing strategy for the company.
“If you’re a consumer, you don’t know what things cost,” Mr. Mead said. “You don’t know what things are worth. You don’t always know how to get the most value out of the health system. We have to bring everybody to the table.”
Doctors and Their Medicare Patients
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Critics who want radical changes in Medicare, the public insurance program for the elderly and disabled, often allege that the program is heading for disaster because stingy payments from the government are causing a rising number of doctors to refuse to serve Medicare patients.
In the critics’ most dire scenarios, baby boomers nearing retirement age could find that their current doctors are no longer willing to treat them under Medicare and that other doctors are turning them down as well. Those concerns have always been greatly exaggerated. Now a new analysis by experts at the Department of Health and Human Services should demolish that mythology for good.
The analysts looked at seven years of federal survey data and found that doctors are not fleeing Medicare in droves; in fact, the percentage of doctors accepting new Medicare patients actually rose to 90.7 percent in 2012 from 87.9 percent in 2005. They are not shunning Medicare patients for better-paying private patients, either; the percentage of doctors accepting new Medicare patients in recent years was slightly higher than the percentage accepting new privately insured patients.
Medicare patients had comparable or better access to medical services than the access reported by privately insured individuals ages 50 to 64, who are just below the age for Medicare eligibility. Surveys sponsored by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, an independent agency that advises Congress, found that 77 percent of the Medicare patients — compared with only 72 percent of privately insured patients — said they never had an unreasonably long wait for a routine doctor’s appointment last year.
The findings from this survey and others can be sliced and diced in many ways. But the overall picture is clear: nationwide there is no shortage of doctors for Medicare patients. It is likely to stay that way, because Medicare is a big insurer that few medical practices can afford to ignore.
Still, a small number of doctors have dropped out of the Medicare program. Roughly 9,500 practicing doctors have currently opted out of Medicare, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. If patients want to stay with these doctors, they have to pay the bills themselves; neither the doctor nor the patient can receive any payment from Medicare.
The number of doctors opting out is tiny compared with the number of doctors, 735,000, who remain in Medicare. In addition, they are augmented by hundreds of thousands of nurse practitioners and other non-doctor providers.
Doctors worry as heart drug research loses steam in favor of cancer medicine
Posted Sept. 03, 2013, at 7:12 a.m.
AMSTERDAM — The hunt for new heart drugs is losing momentum as resources are switched to other areas, notably cancer research, where investors get a better bang for their buck.
Cardiologists fear the fight against heart disease could stall as a result, following major advances in recent decades marked by the advent of drugs to fight cholesterol, lower blood pressure and prevent dangerous blood clots.
The disparity between advances in cancer and heart medicines is already stark. Since the start of 2012, 17 new drugs been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for cancer compared with just three for heart disease.
“There is a clear move of R&D from cardiovascular to cancer and other areas,” said Michel Komajda, a heart specialist at Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital in Paris and a former president of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).
Komajda, like many of his colleagues gathered at the annual ESC congress this week in Amsterdam, is worried.
Despite the giant manufacturers’ stands touting heart medicines at this week’s meeting of some 30,000 doctors, investment in cardiovascular medicine is ebbing — prompting calls for an urgent rebalancing of research priorities.
“There is a view among some that because we have already made a lot of progress in cardiovascular medicine then maybe it doesn’t make sense to invest any more,” Komajda said.
“But there are still some big areas where we need progress, including acute heart failure, which is a growing problem because of an ageing population.”
To some extent, cardiology is a victim of its own success. By any measure, the global war on heart disease to date has been a success, thanks not only to better drugs but also prevention strategies such as anti-smoking campaigns.
In Europe, the death rate from cardiovascular disease has halved over the past 30 years, while the risk of dying within 30 days of a heart attack has been cut by more than half in just 20 years.
No. 1 killer
Yet cardiovascular disease remains the number one killer worldwide and doctors fear a renewed epidemic of heart problems in 20 to 30 years time as a new generation of overweight and obese youngsters reaches middle age.
“It’s a huge concern,” said Patrick O’Gara of Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who is also president-elect of the American College of Cardiology. “We need to replenish the fuel that drives the engine.”
Complex Personal Issues May Cloud Decisions About Buying Insurance
If the volume of email from readers of this column is any indication, people are beginning to focus on how the health care overhaul will affect them.
With the opening of the online health insurance marketplaces less than a month away, consumers with job-based coverage want to know if they can buy a plan there (answer: yes, but they may not qualify for subsidies); those with individual coverage want to know how the plans will compare with what they currently have (answer: generally better coverage and potentially higher premiums, offset by subsidies); and those who have been unable to afford a plan or turned down because they have medical problems want to know if the marketplaces will provide better options than they currently have (answer: they should).
As I read through the emails, what’s striking is the complexity of some of the health insurance dilemmas people are trying to sort out. Getting them answers will be no simple task. The so-called enrollment assisters whose job it will be to help people understand their options and compare plans—navigators, certified application counselors, brokers and others--are going to have their work cut out for them.
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