Latest California Healthline Stories
Earl Ferguson of the Southern Sierra Telehealth Network on Using Technology To Improve Care
Earl Ferguson, director of the Southern Sierra Telehealth Network, spoke with California Healthline about how telemedicine tools can help people in rural areas obtain access to primary care providers and specialists.
Myth-Busting the Reform Law: Sea Change or Scapegoat?
A number of organizations have painted the health reform law as a catalyst for changes in their industries. Yet some groups may be invoking the law as a scapegoat for transformations that would have happened anyway, or using it as a convenient platform on which to advance their interests.
Emergency Departments Chafe at Low Payments, Lack of Help
Emergency departments in California often struggle to get paid for treating patients with a certain type of health insurance. In those cases, reimbursement is routinely delayed or denied, physicians say. Doctors complain that state officials are refusing to address the problem.
Urgent Care Clinics Arrive With Mixed Reviews in San Diego
The country’s only national urgent care franchise, Doctors Express, opened its first California-based center in San Diego this fall, with a second on its way in early 2011. Not everyone is convinced the new centers will provide much-needed relief to local emergency departments.
Spotting a Unicorn: ACOs Inch Closer to Reality
More health care providers are entering into arrangements to create “accountable care organizations,” but these emerging alliances face legal questions because regulators have yet to define ACOs. Potential answers, and several milestones, lie ahead for the model.
Fresno Clinic May Help Prevent Physician Burnout
The Tzu Chi clinic in Fresno, where the goal is to “treat the poor and teach the rich,” helps rejuvenate volunteer physicians, who say prolonged visits with patients remind them why they “got into medicine.”
Doc Shortage Made Worse by Low Participation in Medi-Cal
California faces two related problems about to get worse: not enough family practice physicians and not enough physicians treating Medi-Cal patients. We asked stakeholders how California should deal with these two shortages.
Primary Docs Centerpiece of Reform, but Where Are They?
Health care reform may help alleviate shortage of primary care physicians, but it will take major shifts in medical training and procedures, experts say.
Will ACOs Be A-OK? Model Stirs Hopes, Questions
Accountable care organizations, or ACOs, are the most-discussed acronym-cum-health care payment model since HMOs. As providers across the nation rush to adopt the concept, is California poised to be a leader?
The Perils, Promise of Retail Clinics in California
Medical clinics in drugstores and large retail emporiums have spread slowly but surely in California, but impending changes from national health care reform could change the nascent retail clinic industry’s growth pattern. Will it get a boost, or will it slow down even further?