In an abrupt policy change, the Department of Health and Human Services will make its huge Medicare claims database more broadly available to the public, to help consumers and employers make better-informed decisions about medical care.

In particular, the federal agency will relax its restrictions on the release of information about individual doctors who participate in Medicare, the $524 billion federal program for the elderly and disabled, reversing a three-decade position that doing so would violate physicians’ privacy rights.

The new rules implement a little-noticed provision of the health-care overhaul Congress passed last year.

Dow Jones & Co., The Wall Street Journal’s parent company, filed a lawsuit earlier this year seeking to overturn a 1979 federal-court injunction barring the release of Medicare physician information.

Medicare’s massive claims database is a computerized record of the bills it pays for the medical care of its 48 million beneficiaries. It is widely considered the single best source of information on the U.S. health-care system.

Find out more from the WSJ.

The new Temple/St. Luke’s medical school has its leaders hoping for 150 new doctors in the Lehigh Valley in the coming decade.

Trustees, donors and staff members from St. Luke’s Health Network and Temple University hosted a holiday reception Friday at Saucon Valley Country Club for the school’s 31 inaugural students.

The students began medical school in August at Temple’s main campus, and will study full-time next year at a St. Luke’s Hospital-Anderson campus in Bethlehem Township, Pa.

“We want to keep 50 percent of these students here,” said Dr. Joel C. Rosenfeld, the chief academic officer for St. Luke’s and a senior associate dean for the Temple University School of Medicine. ”That will put 150 new physicians into hospitals in our area over the next 10 years.”

Check out the rest of the article for more information.

UPMC has acquired the largest independent physicians practice in Erie, the hospital system said on Wednesday.

Erie Physicians Network, a multispecialty group with 33 doctors, is expected to become part of UPMC by Nov. 1. UPMC did not disclose terms of the deal.

The move comes about nine months after Pittsburgh’s No. 1 hospital system acquired Hamot Medical Center in Erie. While UPMC has picked up several individual doctors and one small private practice in Erie since the Hamot acquisition, Erie Physicians Network is the largest deal so far.

Nationally, more private-practice physicians are joining hospitals as a way to deal with increasing costs for liability insurance and because of the capital demands of new technology, said Dr. Ralph Schmeltz, a Pittsburgh endocrinologist and president of the Pennsylvania Medical Society. An estimated 50 percent of the state’s physicians are employed by health systems, Schmeltz said.

The deal most likely is also a way for the hospital system to grow UPMC Hamot, he said.

Find out more about the deal at the Tribune-Review.

Because only one in 1,000 patients seen in a medical office or emergency room requires hospitalization, primary care physicians will remain front and center in health care for the foreseeable future, the new national president of the American Osteopathic Association said during a visit Wednesday to Greensburg.

“Family medicine is where most of the care will occur,” said Dr. Martin Levine of Bayonne, N.J., after speaking to a packed auditorium of medical students at Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine at Seton Hill University. The school, in its third year of operation, will graduate its first class in 2013.

Osteopathic-trained physicians practice medicine and surgery the same as medical doctors. They must complete four years of medical school and three years of residency. They use conventional diagnostic and treatment methods and prescribe drugs. In addition, they can treat patients by manipulating the muscular and skeletal systems.

The Association of American Medical Colleges reports there are nearly 366,000 primary care physicians in the United States. By 2020, another 45,000 more will be needed, but the number of students entering medical school has declined by nearly 52 percent since 1997, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians.

That will account for a shortage in the future, said Levine, associate dean of Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine in Harlem.He has testified before Congress about the need for more primary care physicians.

“You need a good primary care doctor,” he said. “That’s No. 1.”

For more on this story visit the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

One little-noticed health care change going into effect this month appears in Section 3114 of the Patient Safety and Affordable Care Act.

In short, it says certified nurse midwives will now receive the same Medicare reimbursement as physicians when they provide the same services, from prenatal care to routine deliveries. They had been getting only 65 percent of the physician’s fee.

The obvious question: What does a profession that specializes in childbirth have to do with a program for people 65 and older?

It has to do with setting a standard. Where Medicare goes, private insurance usually follows. Anyway, that is the hope of midwives and midwife birth centers everywhere.

This week, Pennsylvania’s Department of Public Welfare sent out a questionnaire to the state’s five licensed birth centers to gather cost data so it can review Medicaid payment rates — a sign that reimbursements for birth centers may increase, too.

Read more of the full article: Pay equity for midwives

There’s a hearing scheduled in Harrisburg this week to begin the process of creating state-approved ID’s for medical personnel.

When the question is asked, ‘Is there a doctor in the house?,’ it is usually expected that a D.O. or M.D. will answer and not a PhD.

Scott Chadwick, vice president of government affairs at the Pennsylvania Medical Society, said a law passed last year recognizes that a lot of people in medicine have doctorates but not all are physicians. “You might see a non-physician health care provider with a white lab coat that says Dr. Jones or Dr. Smith and to the public they’ll think that’s a physician,” Chadwick said, “but it might be someone with a doctorate in nursing or some other non-physician speciality.”

For full article: Pa. To Issue ID’s for Medical Personnel

Doctors readily dispense prescriptions and advice, but what do they do themselves? A number of surveys, polls and questionnaires provide some clues—and some surprises.

Physicians as a group are leaner, fitter and live longer than average Americans. Male physicians keep their cholesterol and blood pressure lower. Women doctors are more likely to use hormone-replacement therapy than their patients. Doctors are also less likely to have their own primary care physician—and more apt to abuse prescription drugs.

“As a profession, we have not always taken good care of ourselves,” says Edward Creagan, a professor of medical oncology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., who writes the Mayo stress blog. But doctors who aren’t fit learn their lesson the hard way, he says. There’s a growing awareness that “if one is not psychologically, spiritually and physically fit, one will not go the distance in this profession.”

What’s more, many studies show that doctors who exercise and watch their weight are more likely to counsel patients to do so and be more credible, too.

“There’s a strong link between what doctors do themselves and what they tell their patients to do,” says Erica Frank, a professor of public health at the University of British Columbia who was the principle investigator on the Women Physician’s Health Study (WPHS) which surveyed the health practices of 4,500 women doctors in the 1990s, and has studied U.S. medical students and Canadian doctors as well. “If we pay more attention to physicians’ health, we’ll have a patient population that is healthier.”

Read more.

With more than half its physicians predicted to retire in the next decade, the Scranton region marshaled hefty local and state support to open a medical school in its own backyard.

The Commonwealth Medical College caters to Pennsylvania residents, reserving at least 70 percent of its spots for them in the hope they will stay local.

In doing so, the region confronted one of health care’s most pressing problems: a projected national shortage of 159,300 physicians by 2025, with the greatest impact in rural and other underserved areas, including parts of Philadelphia and South Jersey.

Scranton’s college is one of nearly two dozen medical schools that have opened in recent years or are in planning stages around the country. The growth is the industry’s largest since the mid-1970s.

Several other schools are in the approval process, including a partnership between Cooper Hospital and Rowan University for one in Camden.

Other schools are expanding. Temple University plans to launch a campus in the Lehigh Valley, and Drexel University is considering expansion to other cities in addition to adding slots in its Philadelphia school.

Factors in the growth are an aging and growing population, the expected retirement of about a third of doctors nationally, and changes in health-care policy that will insure more people.

Read more.

As law makers debate health care overhaul, they are also considering ways to increase the number of primary care doctors across the country. If the plan passes, it will cover 30 million additional Americans and some fear there aren’t enough doctors to meet the anticipated need. Host Liane Hansen talks to Dr. Atul Grover, the chief advocacy officer for the Association of American Medical Colleges.

LIANE HANSEN, host:

As health care overhaul legislation advances through the Senate, lawmakers are debating a number of proposals and amendments, including an effort to increase the number of primary care physicians across the country. If the health care bill is approved, more than 30 million Americans would be covered, and some fear there aren’t enough family doctors to meet the anticipated need.

Dr. Atul Grover is the chief advocacy officer for the Association of American Medical Colleges. And he’s in the studio. Welcome to the program.

Dr. ATUL GROVER (Chief Advocacy Officer, Association of American Medical Colleges): Thank you for having me.

HANSEN: Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer of New York reportedly plans to introduce an amendment to the health care bill that would add funding for 2,000 medical residency spots in order to get more primary care physicians into the pipeline. Will that be effective?

Dr. GROVER: I think it’s a good start. The problem is that we’re facing, even without significant expansion in insurance coverage, a shortage of somewhere between 125 and 150,000 physicians by the year 2025. And why that’s important now is because you can’t just pull doctors off the shelf. We’re talking about on average 10 years to train and educate them. So it’s something we need to think about now.

HANSEN: Well, why are some senators opposed to the idea of more of these slots?

Dr. GROVER: Well, I think a lot of it comes down to money. And we know that they’ve had a tough time keeping the total budget for the health care reform package under the limits set by the president of $900 billion. Now, from that standpoint, when we’re talking about an additional 15,000 slots – which is what we’d really like to see come out of legislation – that’d be about an extra billion dollars a year, or 10 or $12 billion over 10 years. That’s a big amount of money.

But if you think about it in the context of what Medicare spends every year – somewhere close to half a trillion dollars on medical care – it doesn’t seem like a lot to spend to insure that there are actually physicians out there, to care for medical beneficiaries and the rest of the American public.

HANSEN: So what will happen if an additional 30 million Americans get added to the health care rolls, if they’re already now are too few primary care doctors?

Dr. GROVER: Well, I think it’s going to be tough for everybody, but particularly for people who are already underserved. And those are people who are living in rural areas or people who are already financially underserved, don’t have insurance. We’re going to get to a lot of them, but not all of them.

Read or listen to the rest of the interview at NPR.