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Baby Reaches Out of Mothers Womb To Hold the Doctor’s Hand–Get Me Out of Here

This is just so cute…
The doctor was performing a C section and after the doctor broke her water out came the hand.  She was ready!  BD



“When my doctor broke my water, the doctor told my husband, ‘Hey, she’s holding my finger,’” Atkins said. ”He had my camera, and so they were able to capture the moment of her holding his hand.”

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/01/infant-in-womb-shown-holding-doctors-hand/

Zoobiquity–Animals Have Many of the Same Health Problems As Do Humans, Obese Dragonflies, Koalas With Chlamydia & They Get “High” in the Wild

This is very interesting on how we can learn about health through the animals, to include our dogs, cats and wild animals.  Timagehis cardiologist from UCLA wrote a book to document her findings and explorations.  (give this some thought next time you see UCLA Medical Center given a “C” on those data flawed rating sites:)  So who’s to blame for our fat dogs and cats?  Well we are if we over feed them as they are dependent upon us but they get a lot of other types of chronic and non chronic care diseases too.  The video here is fascinating on what the doctor found. Now I would never recognize an obese dragonfly nor would I ever think about a “goose” suffering from depression but I’m sure ducks are in there too:)



You can visit the website for the book and see more, including this video with showing how animals behave in the wild and their addiction that develop with finding fields of pot, or berries that have fermented and they are driven and addicted to such.  We had a case in California to where a flock of birds got high on fermented berries and all flew into glass and killed themselves as they were “drunk”.  As is pointed out they don’t have the constant access that we do with buying off the shelf.  Wild animals are getting fatter too she points out.  Cows and goats seem to be less affected in some areas.  The doctor said she became a better doctor after working with veterinarians. Horses she said have sexual performance problems too, so if you are a man you and the stallions may have some common issues:)



From the past with a former pet, who had two major back surgeries I can certainly add that some of the care centers do have veterinarians that specialize in oncology, orthopedics and more and it’s not cheap but they are there and gave my former dog many extra years of life. 

From the website for Clinicians and Scientists

For individuals struggling with, clinicians treating, or investigators studying patients with alcohol and drug abuse “Zoophoria” exposes imagesubstance seeking in wild and domestic animals and offers species-spanning therapeutic insights.  Readers interested in human behavioral disturbances may find “Grooming Gone Wild” of interest as it identifies natural animal models of self-injury (cutting) in animals or “Fear of Feeding” which identifies natural animal models of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa.

“Leaving the Nest” compares adolescents across the animal kingdom revealing a remarkable increase in risk-taking (and increased risk of accidental death) across adolescents of many species. “Fat Planet” points out parallel epidemics of obesity in human and non-human populations including companion animals, agricultural animals and even some species of wild animals. The chapter points to how and why animals gain weight as an unexplored source of knowledge for human obesity investigators. Finally, “Zoobiquity” features the essential role veterinarians play in keeping all of the patients on the planet safe from pandemic threats.

Dogs and cats get compulsive disorders too.  I think mine has one:)

A Dog’s Work Is Never Done–My Loyal Office Assistant Crawls More Than Just the Web (Video)


Animals don’t use condoms and here’s a video talking about STDs in animals and how the Koalas are facing a crisis here with the spread of the disease, and pigs can suffer from anorexia with social stress.  We also know that animals do the get the flu and bird and swine flu that has been in the news and canine flu is now a concern so who knows, perhaps our dogs will be getting vaccines for the flu too and some influenzas blend.  This looks to be a very interesting book and I’ll be putting this one on my list to read.  BD 



Did you know that dragonflies can become obese? That koalas get Chlamydia? Or that cancer dates back to the dinosaurs?

In fact, animals suffer from a lot of the same medical maladies as humans, and these days, zoos across the country are bringing physicians in to consult with veterinarians.

In 2005, Dr. Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, a cardiologist at UCLA Medical Center became one of them when she was called to treat an unusual patient at the Los Angeles Zoo.

“I was doing cardiac ultrasound – which is imaging of the heart of a chimpanzee and some other animals,” explained Natterson–Horowitz. “And I was listening to the veterinarians talking and they talk about diabetes and obesity and cancer.”

Natterson-Horowitz thought it would be interesting to look at human diseases through the lens of veterinary medicine, so she decided to write a book based on her experiences.

“Obesity is a significant problem among cats and dogs, our companion animals – up to 40 percent of them are now overweight,” Natterson-Horowitz said. “Even sexually transmitted diseases. Koalas get chlamydia, killer whales with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. There are many, many parallels.”

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/06/20/zoobiquity-what-animals-can-teach-us-about-our-health/#ixzz2H272du9b

Lexmark Buys Acuo Technologies–Software to Connect to PACS Systems and More To EMRs

This side of the business has certainly grown as I remember the early days and there’s still a lot of this that goes on to get paper information scanned and connected to an EMR to reference.  As a matter of fact many offices did this to to have not go back and pull out older paper charts, a great idea and system.  Now we are at the Enterprise level with bringing  in imaging to connect which again makes sense.  It’s all about the indexing and connecting the relative patient data.  BD



Lexmark International, Inc. has announced the acquisition of Acuo Technologies, LLC, a leader in high performance software and imageservices for clinical content management, data migration and vendor neutral archives (VNA), for a cash purchase price of approximately $45 million. Acuo Technologies will become a part of Perceptive Software, a Lexmark company.

Acuo Technologies, when combined with Lexmark’s Perceptive Software healthcare software solutions, will enable customers to deploy a single, enterprise-wide access platform for clinical content via any electronic medical record (EMR) system.

Acuo Technologies’ offerings include a single integration point for all medical imaging assets, lowering costs and risks through the Universal Clinical Platform’s ability to work with different systems – enabling flexibility and efficiency across users and departments.

http://www.kyforward.com/2013/01/lexmark-acquires-acuo-technologies-continuation-of-capital-allocation-framework/

Physician Rating Sites Are Seeing Fewer Reviews These Days–Flawed Data Catching Up Along With Loss of Value As Consumers and Doctors Lose Interest?

It looks like a group at Loyola University did a study on these sites and they kind of came up with what I have been saying for the last couple of years.  First of all I go back a few years ago when myself and several doctors looked around the sites, dead doctors was one of the first issues we found.  There’s nothing wrong with keeping a listing as those are helpful but the over all grading systems don’t offer much anymore as everyone who does ratings has their own set of parameters they use to judge and give that report card grade.  Now according to this report fewer patients are rating doctors too so more evidence that these sites as far as value have dropped?  Every time I go to one of them I find errors with only a couple searches and the sites blame the state boards for the data but in my opinion, some simple web searches will help all of them update their information.  You can read below where I said six months ago that these sites are getting dated. 


HealthGrades Puts Out Top Hospital List–Time to Drop All the Hospital Ratings Sites As Nobody Cares, Many Don’t Have Time To Read and Too Much “Flawed Data”

You read stories in the news too with major hospitals who get a “C” rating and yet they provide life saving procedures that areimage not available at smaller hospitals so what’ up with that.  I’m back to my same old rant again about quality of data and the rise of “flawed data” in some areas of healthcare.  Healthgrades is now owned by a marketing company so what does that mean?  Better marketing or better information, and I think it’s more like the first. 

 

HealthGrades to Merge with CPM Marketing–Will Their Data and Questionable Algorithms Will Be Improved For Consumers?

I also said consumers were too busy and that’s a fact as now consumers are just as busy as doctors in “correcting” all the flawed data posted by various sites and companies about them.  It’s a scary growing trend but companies make billions selling all kinds of data they mine and they put the money in the bank and consumers and doctors have to spend time on their own dime to fix the flawed data that makes billions in profits for corporate USA.  I said over a year go that it’s time to excise tax all that sell data which would include banks, companies, social networks, etc. 

We could fund the FDA and the NIH with such money.  This is a runaway train here with corporate USA getting free labor to fix all their mistakes as there’s a captive audience here who is stuck as they can’t get whatever they need, be it a car, house or whatever until on their own dime, they fix the flawed data that makes billions in profits for corporate USA, one of my Attack of the Killer Algorithm posts.  Nobody minds the shop government wise and there’s very little risk and these profit makers found the ultimate free labor to fix their data, doctors and consumers sadly.  I only got in on this a few years ago when I found my former doctor who had been dead for 8 years still listed as seeing new patients and the AMA and I had a nice chat about it. 

Here’s some other related information about E-Scoring that gets around the law with what they call their business and you and I as consumers have not a clue on what data they have or have any access as they found a loophole in the law that allows them to do this and sure there’s others who do this as well.  BD

 

One More Good Reason to Tax the Data Sellers– Create Additional Funding for the NIH and FDA From Sources That Otherwise Are Too Greedy to Share & Contribute

Start Licensing and Taxing the Data Sellers of the Internet Making Billions of Profit Dollars Mining “Free Taxpayer Data”–Attack of the Killer Algorithms Chapter 17 - “Occupy Algorithms”– Help Stop Inequality in the US



Newswise — MAYWOOD, Il. - Millions of Americans read physician ratings on websites such as Healthgrades.com, but such ratings are based on scores from an average of only 2.4 patients, a Loyola University Medical Center study has found.

The study of 500 randomly selected urologists found that 79.6 percent of physicians were rated by at least one of the 10 free physician-review websites researchers examined. Eighty-six percent of physicians had positive ratings, with 36 percent receiving highly positive ratings. Healthgrades had the most physician ratings.

Healthgrades posted reviews on 54 percent of physicians, followed in order by Vitals.com, 45 percent of physicians; Avvo.com, 39 percent; RateMDs.com, 25 percent; Drscore, 13 percent; Revolutionhealth.com, 5 percent; Kudzu.com and Healthcarereviews.com, 1 percent; and Zocdoc.com and Yelp.com, less than 1 percent.

http://www.newswise.com/articles/physician-rating-websites-rely-on-few-patient-reviews

Dune Medical Gets FDA Approval On Device Used to Identify Breast Cancer Cells Along the Edges of Tissue- Will Help Avoid Second Surgeries To Remove More Cancer That May Have Been Missed

imageSo what does the machine do? We all wonder when surgery takes place with removing cancer, did they get it all? The devices gives the surgeons the information they need to find out during surgery. The probe uses software that detects to see if any more tissue needs to be cut away.
Radio frequency technology is used and it is the only device that can find microscopic cancer on the marginal tissue. The price is certainly affordable as far as surgical and diagnostics go at 2k. The whole point here is avoid second surgeries of course to remove additional cancer cells.

Right now the device is designed for breast cancer detection only but the company hopes to expand on this for other types of cancers. The clinical trial was done at NYU.

image  BD




Federal regulators have approved a new instrument made by imageDune Medical Devices Inc. that enables breast cancer surgeons to determine immediately whether they have removed all of the cancer tissue during lumpectomy procedures, the company is set to disclose Wednesday.

Dune Medical, based in Caesarea, Israel, plans to move its US office from Framingham to Boston’s Innovation District next week as it builds a sales force to market the device, called the MarginProbe system, to breast cancer surgeons across the nation.

Dune Medical’s new device, already in use in Israel, Germany, and Switzerland, got the green light from the Food and Drug Administration eight months after the privately held company filed its application for premarket approval. That followed clinical trials involving 664 patients at two dozen sites in the United States and Israel. MarginProbe was shown to be effective in identifying cancer along the edge of breast tissue during lumpectomy surgery.



“This is the only device that will identify microscopic cancer on the margin,” Levangie said, noting that MarginProbe is his company’s first approved product. “This is a first-of-a-kind device. But the technology can be applied to a wide variety of other cancers.”

MarginProbe, including the console and probes, will cost health care providers about $2,000, a fraction of the cost of screening equipment used to make the initial diagnosis of breast cancer.

http://bostonglobe.com/business/2013/01/02/dune-medical-wins-fda-approval-sell-new-breast-cancer-tissue-assessment-tool/km72J2iXqbt2Sv3G0mnHRJ/story.html

FDA Approves Another ADHD Generic Version of Concerta

This will offer another alternative generic as if you read on the web there’s a lot of comments about how the generic doesn’t work as well and this is odd because they are both manufactured in the same Ortho-McNeil plant but we don’t know the formulation so again you would think they would be real close if for no other reason than extensive retooling the production line.  Now here’s one from a totally different manufacturer.  BD 



Mallinckrodt, the Pharmaceuticals business of Covidien plc (COV - Analyst Report), has won the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) imageapproval to manufacture and sell a generic version of CONCERTA (methylphenidate HCl) Extended-Release (ER) Tablets USP (CII) in 27 mg, 36 mg and 54 mg dosage strengths.

The tablets are used to treat patients, aged between 6 and 65, suffering from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). ADHD is a neurobehavioral disorder, usually diagnosed in childhood.

Children with ADHD are inattentive, hyperactive and impulsive. Despite being a long-term chronic condition, it can be successfully treated with proper therapy and medication.

http://www.zacks.com/stock/news/89503/fda-approves-covidien-drug

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School Receives $28 Million in Grants from Gates Foundation, Packard Foundation and Hewlett Foundation to Expand Advanced Family Planning Advocacy

The whole idea here is to expand access and use of familyimage planning services.  Nine countries will be in the initiative,  India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Senegal, Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya.  If you have not seen the TED video from Melinda Gates from earlier this year, use the link below and watch it.  You know her influence on the Johns Hopkins grants are is all over it.  BD 

Melinda Gates Talks Birth Control and Contraception–Giving Women the Option To Control When They Want to Have Children–TED Video


Newswise — The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has received $28 million in grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to continue and expand the Advance Family Planning advocacy initiative within the Bloomberg School’s Bill & Melinda Gates Institute on Population and Reproductive Health.

Advance Family Planning aims to increase resources and political commitment for quality family planning programs, as part of the July 2012 London Summit on Family Planning (now known as FP2020). The vision of the summit was to enable more women and girls in some of the world’s poorest countries to use contraceptive information, services and supplies, without coercion or discrimination, by 2020.

http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/597573/?sc=rsla&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NewswiseLatestNews+%28Newswise%3A+Latest+News%29

Allscripts Has More Issues With a Class Action Lawsuit Filed in Florida Claiming MyWay EMR Product Non Performance and Large Expenditures Expenditures

The MyWay system has been around for a long time and it was technology Misys bought, which is now Allscripts.  I used to go up against this early EMR with my little system and shortly after I sold a few licenses everything went to the web and I realized that support and training were going to compound as simple complexities were already on the way and there was no way a single developer could survive and I would die at the keyboard from exhaustion. 

Now we have a clinic in Florida who has filed a class action suit on the behalf of their clinic and any other users who faced similar problems.  Yes it was buggy and that’s part of what occurred and still does at times when you acquire software from other developers and don’t have the programming expertise in house.  That’s what makes Epic so hard to beat too as they have everything in house.  The statements in the lawsuit said over 5000 MDs bought the system over 4 years so that’s a good sized number.  In the early days certification did not exist either.  The lawsuit basically states Allscripts breached it’s warranty to the Clinic with selling a defective product.  The MyWay system was never able to be certified.  The suit also claims the upgrade that was “free” in cost also caused financial lost with the upgrade and having to learn an entirely new system.  The suit also says Allscripts is a foreign corporation.  Just a few weeks ago we had this happen. 

Allscripts Ousts CEO Glen Tullman and Lee Shapiro, President, Appoints Board Member To Take Over

In addition Allscripts is suing NYC Health over the fact that they chose another EHR system, which does not look cool for one.

Allscripts Sues NYC Health and Hospital System Over Contract Award to Epic - EHR Vendor Playing the Same Game as Health Insurance Companies With Lawsuits

Like I have said before it takes time to develop software and EMRs are at the top of the list as new technologies come in to play as well as adding more operability features and that part is always in progress.  As I keep saying “the short order code kitchen burned down a few years ago and there was no fire sale”.  Glad I quit when I did and moved clients to other systems a nominal cost instead of trying to sell mine when all went to the web.  BD


   


"2. Allscripts misled the Clinic, its owner Dr. Robert Joseph, and other physician customers about the quality and functionality of MyWay. The product never worked well and, after four years, in the face of mounting complaints and market pressures to resolve the issues and provide refunds, rather than confess the software's shortcomings and inherent defects and without causing the software to comply with the new federal regulations, Allscripts concocted a story that it had decided to discontinue MyWay and "upgrade" its customers to another - and more expensive - software that it sells named Professional Suite Electronic Health Record System ("EHR Pro"). The "free upgrade" was anything but free. Unlike MyWay, EHR Pro was not developed for small physician groups, is more complicated and more expensive to maintain, and requires more complex integration and staff training. Simply put, it is not the product that the end user bargained for. The Clinic and thousands of other Allscripts physician-purchasers do not want EHR Pro for their electronic health record ("EHR") technology.

3. By selling the defective MyWay product and refusing to fix its defects or refund the purchase price after it decided to discontinue the product, Allscripts has breached its warranty to its physician-customers to provide a product suited for its intended purpose. In addition, Allscripts has been unjustly enriched by retaining the money paid by MyWay purchasers and users without delivering an EHR software product that performs as it was intended to work."

http://www.acgroup.org/home/allscriptsmyway.html

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Cathy O’Neil, Mathematician/Quant: Wall Street Quants The Culture, Big Data Mechanics, Algorithms, Data Mining, Lack of Privacy, Web Profiling, Health Insurance Profiles and Modeling Abuse…

imageThis is pretty good and I felt compelled to include this as she’s the one before the programmers, in other words, Quants build models and programmers design and build it.  In both videos you will find a lot of answers as she’s good and if you read here then you have probably heard a lot of this from a programming side.  She’s the first step ahead and created the model that programmers use to write software.  She has had  a very interesting background and she digs in to big data and that subject I think be renamed, the “data scientist”…same thoughts where in the world do you find these people.  You can find her blog here, MathBabe, like the name. 

“Data Scientists”– An Oxymoron? Is Finding the Value in Data Bases Queried Together in the Business World To Make Money Actually Science?


She gives her background about being a young nerd and she has been a professor and later was hired by a Wall Street Hedge Fund as a Quant.  She worked with Larry Summers who ended up going to work for the Obama Administration.  Her idea at the time was to “fix” the system.  Nobody including the SEC wanted to hire her and she says the same thing I have said many times, get the attorneys out and get the computer scientists folks in there.  She said nobody cared with the models and some of the CDO models were completely broken and gave random numbers.  Clients were never given fair warnings she said and she gave up and left and applied again to the Feds and and she signed forms to where she could not give away the private information on the models but she could talk about “techniques” of models and that’s what she does on her blog.  Her idea is to help people, not exploit them.  She says portfolios are “dummied” down into single numbers so those that think they understand can understand but they don’t really understand:)  My thoughts from a short while back on risk. 

Hiding, Falsifying, And Accelerating Risk Has Become the Achilles Heel of the US Economy As the “Real” World” Clashes With the Values Created From a World of “Fictional Values” Of Formulas and Math


Models are used increase obscurity and are not explained and are abused.  I made my comments on models used out of “context”.  imageAvoid doing harm she states.  She still models and knows the benefits when done correctly.  Nerds are never in charge.  I just talked with someone the other day where a study was done and the data was not supplied to substantiate the abstract and without the data, the recipient determined there were over 500 million available models, data counts and you just can’t take to the bank a report or study you see in the news without offering someone the opportunity to confirm the data origins, etc. 

Big Data/Analytics If Used Out of Context and Without True Values Stand To Be A Huge Discriminatory Practice Against Consumers–More Honest Data Scientists Needed to Formulate Accuracy/Value To Keep Algo Duping For Profit Out of the Game


A little later on she talks about how models get used “that was a really useful model to make a lot of money”…you’ve had heard something like that here before:)  People are trained to think of mathematics as a game you have to “win”, the culture in finance.  No Quants are ever expected to answer or account for the consequences on the effects of normal people.  Modeling has gone crazy and it has and it will. 

You can speed up to around 18 minutes where the healthcare portion comes in.  Think about 15 years from now she says, the information on the web about you never goes away.  De-Identified data, she says the same thing I said a few years ago, people are good at matching up De-Identified data, heck I did it years ago and not for the purpose of selling data or anything of the sort, it was some algorithms that I wrote for integrating software and to check and balance myself I created sample data that would rematch in the system for billing and an automated super bill system. 

Old hat been around a long time and a couple years ago the OMG stuff on the web about this being possible, that’s just when the public woke up. It’s not that we are really that smart it’s just that we have “been there done that” way before a consumer even hears the concept, why we are geeks:)  What is great about her videos is that she does for modeling about the same as I do for programming and there’s nothing like hands on as everyone else just reads other stuff and repeats it. She addresses both sides of healthcare data and says the clinical side is great and of course I agree, but then we have the health insurers who use segmentation in the opposite direction. 



She did some other jobs and a lot with credit risks.  Listen to her job offer about modeling in Hollywood and she’s see right through it with crazy modeling and how it keeps inequality alive.  If you want to hear her points on healthcare move forward to around 16 minutes.  Here’s a second video to where she talks at the Hadoop Strata Conference.  She says you can’t just rebrand people from the inside and turn them into data scientists. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3up4PezpthU



Here’s the series on the Attack of the Killer Algorithms that go right in line with what Cathy says and watch the videos and they are also on the left hand side of this blog on every page.  If you want a look into reality on how math and formulas rule the world, spend the time and get a tiny bit of education to understand how this works quietly behind the scenes and how the algorithms shift and take your money, a few SQL “strings” at a time.  BD


Attack of the Killer Algorithms–Digest & Links for All Chapters–on How Math and Crafty Formulas Today Running on Servers 24/7 Make Life Impacting Decisions About You

Quants: The Alchemists of Wall Street Video Documentary - Why It Needs to Matter What Companies Do and Not Focus Only On the Price of Stock With So Called Value - Attack of the Killer Algorithms Chapter 44


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXdeRcvz_zE

FDA Approves New Drug for Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis, Sirturo –First New Drug in 40 Years for TB

Amongst all the recalls Johnson and Johnson has had a good year with FDA approvals including this one as there has not bee anything new approved in years.  There is an inhaled TB vaccine in the works from a few years back.

Inhaled Tuberculosis Vaccine More Effective Than Traditional Shot


Probably more recent in the news was the “Occupy” location in Atlanta where homeless people were testing positive for TB.  The newimage drug is pretty hefty with warnings as well and is to be used after other medications have failed and carries the black box warning as it is considered a new class of drugs and there could be more deaths attributed to it’s use.    This type of TB is rare in the US but growing in other countries and TB is spread through the air.  BD

Atlanta Occupy Location Tests Positive for Tuberculosis and May Have to Relocate Again


The Food & Drug Administration today approved the first drug to treat multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, Johnson & Johnson’s (NYSE: JNJ) bedaquiline (Sirturo), an important breakthrough in the global fight against one of the world’s deadliest diseases.

Made by J&J’s Janssen Therapeutics division, based in Titusville, NJ, bedaquiline is meant for patients who have failed to respond to all other treatments.

It works by blocking an enzyme critical to the replication of M.tuberculosis bacteria, and the company said it is the first new drug in 40 years to attack TB via a new mechanism of action.

http://www.xconomy.com/new-york/2012/12/31/fda-approves-jj-drug-for-multi-drug-resistant-tuberculosis/

Hospital Facility Fees Up for Discussion Again as Out of Pocket Costs Rise for Patients When Hospitals Buy Physician Practices And Appear to be Growing

Facility fees are allowed by Medicare for hospitals to charge and these are tacked on, separate from medical services received.  More and imagemore of these types of charges are appearing on medical bills, especially ones set up for outpatient services.  Sometimes insurers do not pay the fees and thus some patients begin looking for doctors who do not have this charge.  Facility fees are amounting up to a billion dollars a year that Medicare pays, so you wonder what is accomplished here as practices can charge more that are owned by hospitals too so does Medicare get the double whammy when they are trying to save money? 

So as a patient, pay attention if you can to if your doctor’s practice was sold to a hospital as you may begin seeing those soon.  The story quotes one woman getting a facility or services fee for 8k, so of course that was negotiated down by the insurance company and and she ended up having to pay over a thousand of that fee.  Better disclosure is certainly needed as they are not always posted either.  They all do it and back in 2009 I wrote about the fee that Cleveland Clinics charge and the $55.00 fee looks rather small compared to what is being charged now with some of these fees.  BD

Cleveland Clinic “facility fee” or “hospital services fee” has Patients up in Arms


One family accustomed to paying about $120 in out-of-pocket costs for doctor visits and other medical services was outraged when their costs for similar visits soared to $1,000, Mullin said.

The reason for the increase: The physician practice had been bought by a local hospital, and “all of a sudden everything was charged differently,” said Mullin, a Republican.

The higher bills reflected “facility fees.” For years, hospitals that own physician practices and outpatient clinics have been allowed by Medicare to tack on these fees, separate from bills for doctors’ services, for the use of the facilities. As hospitals buy up medical practices and set up outpatient treatment centers, more of these fees are showing up on patients’ bills.

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-12-23/national/36017221_1_facility-fees-hospitals-face-medicare-costs