By SHEFALI LUTHRA
When President Donald Trump signed the last-minute budget deal into law earlier this month, the news coverage emphasized how the bill boosted military funding, provided tens of billions in disaster aid and raised the debt ceiling.

But buried deep in the 652-page legislation was a repeal of a limit on Medicare coverage of physical and occupational therapy. It received little public attention, but to the American Physical Therapy Association, this headline was decades in the making.

The group had spent 20 years lobbying to reverse a component of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, which would have limited patients to $2,010 worth of occupational therapy a year, and another $2,010 [Read More]

In an email letter to members of the Michigan State University Board of Trustees, the university’s new interim president, John Engler, reports he wants to fire Dr. William Strampel, Dean of the Osteopathic Medical School since 2002, for his role in the Larry Nassar case.

The President’s recommendation, after five days on the job, requires an affirmative vote of a faculty hearing committee to reverse his tenure.

Strampel has been on medical leave since last December.

According to an MSU news release, he was accused of not following-up on the medical procedures he asked Nassar to follow after a joint FBI and campus police department investigation into sexual abuse allegations concerning Nassar.

The release [Read More]

A former University of Michigan-affiliated pediatric rheumatologist who was investigated for having sex with a patient is facing federal child pornography charges, according to a federal complaint unsealed Feb. 12.

Mark Franklin Hoeltzel, 46, stood mute—meaning a not guilty plea was entered for him—in front of U.S. District Magistrate Judge Elizabeth A. Stafford. He is charged with receipt of and possession of child pornography. He faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted as charged.

U.S. Assistant Attorney General Mollie O’Rourke asked that Hoeltzel be immediately detained, which Stafford granted.

Defense attorney Raymond Cassar said he demanded the hearing to argue for his client’s release because he believes Hoeltzel, who had returned [Read More]

By SARAH HILLEGONDS
Recently, we have received reports that the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) is conducting aggressive audits of pharmacies that concentrate on invoice and inventory records. In most cases, the targets of these invoice and inventory audits are independent pharmacies. According to the OIG, the purpose of inventory audits is to ensure that a pharmacy is not billing Medicaid for more drugs than it purchased. But the methodology utilized by the OIG is susceptible to error, resulting in inaccurate overpayment demands, and there are questions as to the legality of these types of audits prior to July 1, 2015. This article [Read More]

By EWA MATUSZEWSKI
The upstreamists are coming! The upstreamists are coming! If you know what I’m talking about, I’ll consider you a loyal follower of this column—or someone who is already attuned to the social determinants of health (#SDOH). In my October 2017 column, I discussed a call to action on #SDOH and cited the upstreamist term used by Rishi Manchanda, MD, a physician and public health innovator who has worked in South Central Los Angeles and advocates for incorporating #SDOH into primary care.

I couldn’t be more excited to announce that Dr. Manchanda will be coming to Michigan (for the first time!) when MedNetOne joins with the Oakland University School of [Read More]

By SUSAN ADELMAN, MD
In the age of Larry Nassar, in the era of #metoo, what is a girl to think? What is a doctor to think? What are the rules these days? From the standpoint of doctor-patient relations, the fallout from the Larry Nassar case could be toxic for medical care.

First, how are doctors trained? When young people graduate from medical school and enter practice, traditionally they take the Hippocratic Oath, either as originally written, or as updated. The Oath has two salient sentences. The first is: “I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrong-doing.”

The [Read More]

By MARKI STEWART
The use of telemedicine has soared in recent years, as new technologies develop and consumer demand for instant access to healthcare increases. Indeed, the telemedicine market is expected to grow to $113.1 billion by 2025, at an estimated compound annual growth rate of 18.8%. It is expected that at least 7 million patients in the United States will access telemedicine services in 2018, a sharp increase from 2013, when the estimated number of telehealth patients was fewer than 350,000. Despite this momentous growth, reimbursement continues to be a key obstacle for telemedicine providers. However, reimbursement rules by various payors are slowly expanding to cover more telemedicine services.

Medicare [Read More]

By ALLAN DOBZYNIAK, MD
The collective “wisdom” promoted by the MBAs, nouveau healthcare experts, politicians and bureaucrats can be condensed into a singular thought: Doctors were part of an anachronistic model which was condescendingly labeled a “cottage Industry.” According to this expanding array of mutually anointed experts, this was a stupid residual from a previous era. The truly operative word here is industry. Then, as an industry, it needed to be aggressively nudged into modernity as these wizards envisioned it. Included in this group-think vision was the caveat that turning the physicians’ practice of medicine, a profession, into an industrial model laden with regulations, mandates, rules, care models and protocols was [Read More]

(FLINT)—an 80 percent majority of the 87 Legionnaires’ diseases cases that came out of the city of Flint from 2014 to 2017 can be connected to the city’s water supply, according to a hotly disputed study released in early February.

A research team made up of experts from the University of Michigan, Wayne State University and Colorado State University also found the less chlorine used to treat Flint River water, the more likely those who drank the water contracted Legionnaires’ disease.

Temperature of the water was not tested, a key point because the warmer the water, the easier it is for Legionella to grow. However, the researches from the “Flint Area Community [Read More]

Three huge and influential employers, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan Chase, announced Jan. 30 they were partnering to create an independent company aimed at reining in health-care costs for their U.S. employees.

There were almost no details available about what the company would do or how it would use technology to disrupt and simplify the complicated fabric of American health care. But there’s no doubt that the companies, which collectively employ more than 1 million workers worldwide, have a real interest in ratcheting down their spending on health care. Health-care premiums are split between employers and employees and have been growing much faster than wages.

Major health company stock prices tumbled [Read More]