FALLS CHURCH – Top medical news headlines from Noblis Health Innovation for Tuesday, August 17. Click on the underlined item for the actual link to the story:

• Recalls Surge in 2009: CNN’s Parija Kavilanz reports that drug recalls hit all time high in 2009.
• Study: Texting improves medication adherence in teens with diabetes: A small pilot study at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, found that sending text reminders to adolescent diabetes patients about their insulin treatments improved treatment adherence and blood glucose levels.
• Pennsylvania ramps up incentive payment system: Pennsylvania’s Office of Medical Assistance Programs (OMAP) will launch an application it hopes will streamline and secure the tracking of payments to Medicaid providers that meet criteria for financial incentives outlined in new federal meaningful use rule.
• Communication problems suggest patients, doctors often aren’t on the same page: When it comes to communicating with patients, doctors aren’t doing as well as they give themselves credit for, according to findings from a study published in the August Archives of Internal Medicine.

Follow our RSS feed or catch the latest news on health safety and recall from RASMAS’ Bill Klein on Twitter at http://twitter.com/healthrecall.

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LONDON – A British design student at the Royal College of Art has commercialized his product that reduces the incidence of needle stick injury in British healthcare workers. Michael Korn of RCA Industrial Design Engineering invented StickSafe, a simple product that prevents accidental jabs from needles. It is a tray that has been designed to allow one handed de-sheathing and re-sheathing, eliminating walks to a sharps bin, or the possibility that a bin is full.

The accidental jabbing of oneself or others with used, contaminated needles can lead to infection from patients, and is the second most commonly reported accident in the UK National Health Service with around 100,000 cases reported annually. The costs to the NHS have been estimated to be greater than £ 300 million, although it is a problem around the world. The project is supported by the National Health Service Innovation Centre. (more…)

WASHINGTON - A new investigation by USA Today on the issue of school food safety says that answers to improving the safety of school food are close at hand.

Reporters Elizabeth Weise and Peter Eisler write today that there are industries and major companies, both in the United States and abroad, that have made great strides in safety and consistently produce food free of the bacteria that sicken about 75 million Americans a year. (more…)

YORK, Pa. - The new Mercury Free Thermostat Act bans the sale, installation and disposal of mercury-containing thermostats in Pennsylvania. Pennysylvania is one of a handful of states now banning mercury thermostats; the act goes into effect this month.

“Mercury thermostats were a staple of the heating and cooling industry for decades. Millions of homes and businesses used them and continue to use them safely,” said Department of Environmental Protection Deputy Secretary for Waste, Air and Radiation Protection Kenneth Reisinger, in a press release. The law says that mercury-free thermostats can only be sold in Pennsylvania and and the law requires contractors and homeowners to recycle out-of-service thermostats and wholesalers to collect them. (more…)

A roundup of new ideas promoting health safety that are in the headlines this week.

• Blood Clotting Foam: The best way to stop bleeding might be to foam up. Remedium Technologies Inc., a College Park, Maryland firm, developed a shaving cream-like foam that stops severe bleeding. It won first prize and $10,000 in the “Most Promising Security Idea” category of the Global Security Challenge 2009. They were selected from more than 100 entries at the GSC Security Summit at the London School of Business, according to the sponsoring Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute. (more…)

DALLAS – A new campaign is teaching teens to step in during cardiac arrest using tunes like Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” and Madonna’s “Who’s that Girl” and a MySpace page. The campaign, sponsored by a $1 million grant from the Medtronic Foundation, was developed by the American Heart Association.

Be the Beat teaches 12- to 15-year-olds fun ways to learn the basics of cardiopulmonary resuscitation, better known as CPR, and the basics of using an automated external defibrillator, or AED. Video games, interactive quizzes and 100-beat-per-minute songs can help teach teens and tweens what to do if someone collapses in sudden cardiac arrest. The campaign is quite cheeky; it makes it for “teens” only and even uses the U-2 song “Sunday Bloody Sunday.”

See more at www.americanheart.org, www.medtronic.com or bethebeat.heart.org

SAN DIEGO - A new survey of hospital administrators finds that if healthcare becomes universal, there will be not enough doctors to meet the demand.

The survey, sponsored by the hospital staffing company AMN Healthcare and the Council on Physician and Nurse Supply, said that seventy percent of administrators said there would not be enough doctors to meet demand if access becomes universal, 51 percent said there would not be enough nurses, 48 percent said there would not be enough allied healthcare professionals and 45 percent said there would not be enough pharmacists. CEOs reported an average hospital vacancy rate of 11 percent for physicians, six percent for nurses, five percent for allied healthcare professionals and five percent for pharmacists.

Other headlines for today include:

• A new Rand Corporation study, set for release in the New England Journal of Medicine, recommends a number of promising approaches to slow health care spending include adoption of electronic health records, programs to better-manage chronic diseases, strengthening patients’ use of primary care and encouraging wider use of lower-cost providers such as nurse practitioners and settings such as retail health clinics.
• Women are six times more likely to be separated or divorced soon after a diagnosis of cancer than if a man, a new study reports. The study by the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, which includes Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, UW Medicine and Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center, confirmed earlier research that put the overall rate among patients at 11.6 percent, similar to the population. However, researchers were surprised by the difference in separation and divorce rates by gender. The rate when the woman was the patient was 20.8 percent compared to 2.9 percent when the man was the patient.