Sacramento / NorCal

Feather River Hospital wins ADA recognition for diabetes education program

The American Diabetes Association Education Recognition Certificate for a quality diabetes self-management education program was awarded to the Adventist Health Feather River Hospital Diabetes Education Program in October.
The Association’s Education Recognition Certificate assures that educational programs meet the National Standards for Diabetes Self-Management Education Programs. Education Recognition status is verified by an official certificate from ADA and awarded for three years.

Western Health cuts Medi-Cal

Western Health Advantage announced plans that it will cancel its Medi-Cal contract on Jan. 1, citing too-small state insurance reimbursements as the reason it isn’t financially viable for the HMO to continue care for low-income patients.
As a result, 16,000 low-income Sacramento County residents will have to sign up with another health plan by the year’s end. But it is unclear whether the remaining four programs for low-income residents will accept any of WHA’s members. Kaiser, for example, has attempted to cap enrollment in its Sacramento program at 20,000. That program has 22,891 members.
“At this point, we are not in a position to take any additional members through this program,” Kaiser spokesman Edwin Garcia wrote in an e-mail to the Sacramento Business Journal. “But we will continue to evaluate the situation and possible solutions.”
UC Davis Health System, Catholic Healthcare West and the NorthBay Health Care System in Fairfield own the nonprofit WHA, which was established to allow UC Davis to continue to treat Medi-Cal recipients in Sacramento County
Shortly after its founding, the health plan expanded into the commercial market, and now has more than 65,000 private-sector members, but can no longer sustain the Medi-Cal business.

Bay Area

Sutter to merge North Bay, CPMC Medical Foundations
Two of Sutter Health’s medical foundations are going to merge next year, creating the Sutter Pacific Medical Foundation. The new organization will include more than 300 physicians and medical practitioners in San Francisco, Lake, Marin and Sonoma counties.
The new group is being formed from the merger of the Sutter North Bay Medical Foundation and the Physicians Foundation at California Pacific Medical Center. Morris Flaum, M.D., who runs the CPMC Foundation, will be the CEO of the new organization.

Affinity Medical Group, Marin IPA Top List of Bay Area Physician Practices

The East Bay’s Affinity Medical Group, the Marin IPA, and various Permanente Medical Groups in the Bay Area were recently named “top performers” in the pay-for-performance measurement categories by the Oakland-based Integrated Healthcare Association (IHA).
The IHA is a statewide organization that promotes quality improvement, accountability and affordability of health care. The IHA’s pay-for-performance (P4P) program is the largest non-governmental physician incentive program in the United States and includes eight health plans (including Kaiser for reporting only) and more than 225 medical organizations with 35,000 physicians.
For the full list of winners, visit www.hcjnc.com, and click on “Healthcare Quality.”

UCSF Biologist Honored with Nobel Prize in Medicine
University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn, Ph.D., was honored with the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. She is the fourth UCSF scientist to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Blackburn, along with Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Jack Szostak of Harvard Medical School, discovered telomerase, an enzyme that plays a key role in normal cell function, as well as in cell aging and most cancers. Blackburn’s work on this began in the 1970s.

UCSF neurologist wins NIH award
UCSF neurosurgeon Daniel Lim, M.D., Ph.D., received a $1.5 million, five-year grant as part of the NIH New Innovator Award (of which there are 55 nationally). Lim is an assistant professor in residence of neurological surgery and director of restorative neurosurgery, and will use the grant to study gene expression switches that may be responsible for the progressive specialization of neural stem cells.

California partners with China to advance stem cell research
The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), the state’s stem cell agency, and the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) signed an agreement in October to collaborate on stem cell research.
The agreement will make it easier for researchers in California and China to obtain joint funding to broaden the potential pool of expertise that can be applied toward research in a specific area. It is expected that researchers in both jurisdictions will be invited to form teams that will apply jointly for funding through a process that builds upon routine CIRM and MOST procedures. For those that are approved, CIRM will fund the California researchers and MOST will fund the Chinese researchers.
The agreement notes that both agencies will assure the research is conducted in “compliance with the highest standards for ethical conduct and safety at all stages of research including clinical study.”

Bay Area leads world in commercial neuroscience
According to a new study published by NeuroInsights and the Neurotechnology Industry Organization, the San Francisco Bay Area leads the world in innovative treatments for brain-related illness. Rankings were based on three broad factors: number of neuroscience-focused companies, availability of local risk capital and social infrastructure (universities, hospitals, research institutes). While the Bay Area ranked first, Boston, New York /New Jersey, London and San Diego rounded out the top five regions for neuroscience.

San Ramon opens breast cancer center after $1.7M renovation
San Ramon Regional Medical Center celebrated the opening of its renovated 2,500-square-foot Breast Cancer Center in late October.
The outpatient center at 7777 Norris Canyon Road features two Hologic digital mammography units, computer-aided detection capabilities designed to improve detection and interpretation of microcalcifications with digital mammography, ultrasound, X-ray and other diagnostic equipment, and an MRI with advanced breast imaging technology adjacent to the main hospital.

Michelson Foundation pledges $250K for new Sequoia Hospital
The Michelson Foundation of San Francisco pledged $250,000 to help build and equip Redwood City’s new Sequoia Hospital. The new hospital will be a full service, 148,000-square-foot, $240 million facility located in the center of the Sequoia campus, and will be largely dedicated to cardiac and vascular services. To date, the hospital’s campaign has raised roughly $8 million of its $20 million fundraising goal. The remainder of the cost will be met by a collaborative funding plan by Catholic Healthcare West, Sequoia Hospital and the Sequoia Healthcare District.

Silicon Valley
Earlier vaccinations could save lives
In a city the size of New York, starting a vaccination campaign a few weeks earlier could save almost 600 lives and over $150 million, according to a study by scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
The study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, modeled a pandemic in a hypothetical urban area with a population and demographic characteristics mirroring New York City.
It concluded that under a very broad range of assumptions, vaccinating in October would save more money and lives than in November, and that vaccinating at either time was better than no campaign at all. An October campaign would avert 2,051 deaths and save $469 million, while a November campaign would prevent 1,468 deaths and save $302 million relative to doing nothing.
“To put it simply, the most cost-saving and life-saving strategy is to vaccinate as many people as possible as soon as possible,” said the study’s first author, Nayer Khazeni, M.D., an instructor of medicine in pulmonary and critical care and an associate at Stanford’s Center for Health Policy and Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research.
Avoiding hospitalizations, for instance, provides a huge financial payoff, according to the study’s senior author Douglas Owens, M.D., senior investigator at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System and professor of medicine and of health research and policy at the medical school. “A two-week stay in an intensive care unit could cost well over $50,000,”said Owens. “You can vaccinate a lot of people for that much.”

Catheter-directed therapy best first-line treatment for pulmonary embolism
A recent study led by Stanford assistant professor of radiology William Kuo, M.D., suggested using the new treatment method called catheter-directed therapy or catheter-directed thrombolysis as a first-line treatment for pulmonary embolism. Kuo’s research team discovered 594 patients in 18 countries who had undergone this therapy between 1990 and 2008. After statistically analyzing the data, they found that not only was the treatment effective, but it also appeared much safer than injecting the high-dose thrombolytic drug systemically or directly into the bloodstream where it can circulate throughout the body and cause dangerous bleeding in up to 20 percent of patients. By targeting blood clots directly, the catheter-based procedure was associated with only a 2.4 percent chance of major complications, and the procedure was life-saving in 86.5 percent of the 594 patients dying from PE.
The catheter-based technique involves targeted drug delivery, which typically uses a much lower dose of the potent thrombolytic drug because it is injected directly into diseased areas. Thus, it can be useful in patients who cannot tolerate the high-dose systemic drug treatment, which carries a significant risk of bleeding.
The researchers concluded that “modern catheter-directed therapy is a relatively safe and effective treatment for acute massive pulmonary embolism and should be considered as a first-line treatment.”
The study was published Oct. 30 in the Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology.