Latest California Healthline Stories
Nearly a decade ago, Dr. Jeffrey Brenner and his Camden Coalition appeared to have an answer to remake American health care: Treat the sickest and most expensive patients. But a rigorous study in the New England Journal of Medicine shows the approach doesn’t save money. “We built a brilliant intervention to navigate people to nowhere,” Brenner tells the “Tradeoffs” podcast.
Some of California’s most prized rivers, bays, beaches and streams are contaminated with levels of fecal bacteria that exceed state limits, threatening human health. While aging sewage infrastructure is largely to blame, homeless encampments are also a probable source of contamination.
“Street medicine” programs seek out people living in back alleys and under highways. It’s a public health approach designed to build trust and eventually connect homeless patients to other services.
Denver is considering adopting a new 911 alternative used in Eugene, Ore., that allows mental health and medical professionals, not police officers, to respond to some emergency calls, saving money and de-escalating situations with mentally ill people.
A large public hospital in Los Angeles gets over 1,000 unidentified patients a year. Most are quickly identified, but some require considerable gumshoe work — a task that can be complicated by medical privacy laws.
California hospitals must comply with a new state law that requires them to try to find a safe place for homeless patients upon discharge. But hospitals say doing so isn’t as easy as calling a shelter and securing a cot.
Homeless patients accounted for about 100,000 visits to California hospitals in 2017, marking a 28% increase from just two years earlier. Health officials attribute the surge to the overall rise in California’s homeless numbers and the large proportion of people living on the streets with mental illness.
Outbreaks of infectious diseases such as typhus and hepatitis A are resurging in California and around the country, particularly among homeless populations. Public health officials warn that such diseases could spread broadly.
The dialysis industry raised nearly $111 million in a successful bid to defeat the measure, which also was opposed by hospitals and doctors. The union that sponsored the measure collected about one-sixth that amount.
Gov. Jerry Brown approved numerous new health care laws addressing a broad range of issues, but he vetoed several bills, including one that would have allowed parents to administer medical marijuana to their children in school and another that would have made the abortion pill available at the student health centers of California’s public universities.