Health

Quinnipiac University has selected St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Bridgeport to be the principal clinical partner of its new medical school, which is scheduled to begin classes in 2013. Under a five-year agreement between the two institutions, St. Vincent’s medical staff will take part in designing the medical school’s clinical curriculum and academic policies and […]

The government moved a step closer Friday toward defining what “essential benefits” would be offered by companies selling coverage to millions of Americans in new insurance exchanges. In a 297-page report, the Institute of Medicine, a federal advisory panel, laid out criteria and methods the Department of Health and Human Services should use in developing […]

Forty percent of the money Medicare paid for breast, colon, prostate and cervical cancer screenings during a recent six-year period involved patients considered too old to receive them by an independent government task force, report Rochelle Sharpe and Elizabeth Lucas of the Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News. That amounted to about $1.9 billion between […]

Rating the best hospitals has become commonplace, with U.S. News, research firms and various Internet sites routinely issuing detailed rankings. Now some health researchers have come up with a way to evaluate which hospitals are the worst. In a new paper for Health Affairs, Ashish Jha, John Orav and Arnold Epstein classified 3,229 hospitals by quality, using […]

The existence of “hot” streaks among athletes–periods of consistent high performance–has been a matter of contention among scientists, some of whom have found that the idea is likely a myth. But after analyzing thousands of free throws taken by National Basketball Association players, Yale School of Medicine researchers say there’s evidence that the “hot hand” […]

Smoking rates decreased, cancer deaths fell and fatal cases of coronary heart disease dropped in the U.S. during the first decade of the 21st century. But racial and ethnic disparities in health persisted, and across the board, obesity grew dramatically, federal and state officials said Thursday during a webinar to review Healthy People 2010, a […]

A Hartford-based workforce board is getting $4.98 million in federal funds to train unemployed registered nurses, medical coders and information technology professionals to work in fields with available jobs. The New England Knowledge Corridor Health Careers Project will develop a curriculum for people to work in medical coding–a field that is becoming more complex–and will […]

Many emergency department directors at Connecticut hospitals say their departments expedite care for very important persons and see doing so as “vaguely unethical but necessary,” according to a letter written by Hartford Hospital emergency medicine director Dr. A.J. Smally and published this month in the journal Annals of Emergency Medicine. Smally and four colleagues wrote […]

Connecticut has the second-highest incidence of breast cancer in the country, but is among the lower third of states when it comes to breast cancer deaths, according to a report released Monday by the Connecticut affiliate of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a breast cancer advocacy organization. To give a picture of breast cancer […]

Sen. Joe Markley, the ranking Republican on the Human Services Committee, has asked state auditors to investigate claims of fraud involving benefits distributed by the state Department of Social Services this month to make up for losses incurred in Tropical Storm Irene. In a letter to the auditors, Markley questioned how eligibility for the benefits […]

The Department of Social Services has selected Community Health Network of Connecticut Inc. to negotiate a contract to administer Medicaid and the state’s other public health care programs, which serve nearly 600,000 people. The Wallingford-based nonprofit currently serves as one of three managed care companies that administer the HUSKY program for mostly low-income children and […]