Kaiser Health News (KHN)

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$18 For A Baby Aspirin? Hospitals Hike Costs For Everyday Drugs For Some Patients

Susan Jaffe | Kaiser Health News | April 30, 2012

Sudden chest pains landed Diane Zachor in a Duluth, Minn., hospital overnight, but weeks later she had another shock – a $442 bill for the same everyday drugs she also takes at home, including more than a half dozen common medicines to control diabetes, heart problems and high cholesterol. Read More »

Health Insurance Marketplace Plans Vary Widely in Price

Jordan Rau & Julie Appleby | Government Technology | October 7, 2013

Consumers shopping in the new health insurance marketplaces will face a bewildering array of competing plans in some counties and sparse options in other places, with people in some areas of the country having to pay much more for the identical level of coverage than consumers elsewhere. Read More »

Hospitals' Struggles To Beat Back Familiar Infections Before Ebola Arrived

Staff Writer | Kaiser Health News | October 23, 2014

While Ebola stokes public anxiety, more than one in six hospitals – including some top medical centers – are having trouble stamping out less exotic but sometimes deadly infections, federal records show...

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Tech Glitches at One VA Site Raise Concerns About a Nationwide Rollout

Spokane, Washington, was supposed to be the center of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ tech reinvention, the first site in the agency’s decade-long project to change its medical records software. But one morning in early March, the latest system malfunction made some clinicians snap. At Spokane’s Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center, the records system — developed by Cerner Corp., based in North Kansas City, Missouri — went down. Staffers, inside the hospital and its outpatient facilities, were back to relying on pen and paper. Computerized schedules were inaccessible. Physicians couldn’t enter new orders or change patients’ medications.

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