Physicians who provided medical misinformation that affected patient's care throughout the COVID-19 pandemic have seen few consequences, The Washington Post found.

More large insurers appear to be using 24-hour helplines to provide patients with clinical advice, but they may serve only to send more patients to the emergency room unnecessarily, Fred Pelzman, MD, wrote in an opinion piece published July 24 on MedPage Today.

The physician workforce has grown 23 percent since 2010, and women and those with DO degrees represent the fastest-growing demographics, a physician census found.

American Physician Partners' planned closure on July 31 has left more than 150 hospitals and health systems with just two weeks to secure new emergency or hospital medicine services. 

Not even one month since it launched a new voluntary Health Care Equity Certification Program, The Joint Commission is seeing vast interest in it and has received multiple applications since its July 1 announcement.

Rising violence against hospital employees has led workers from multiple San Diego hospitals to create a task force to address the growing problem, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported July 23. 

After the Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined Oregon State Hospital $54,000 in October for failing to prevent workplace injuries, attacks on the hospital's workers have not decreased, according to the Statesman Journal.

Physicians at Boston-based Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center are teaching students to use artificial intelligence chatbots to help diagnose cases, The New York Times reported July 22.

Patients are staying longer than they need to in hospital beds, leading to adverse health issues, capacity issues and delayed access to those beds for incoming patients, and this issue is only getting worse, experts at the American Hospital Association told Becker's.

One person was killed and five others injured after a car crashed into pedestrians in the parking garage of Washington, D.C.-based MedStar Georgetown University Hospital July 20, The Washington Post reported.

While some leaders credit part-time work with keeping physicians in the fields, they grapple with how best to keep morale up while still providing patient care.

New York City-based Weill Cornell Medicine researchers found that the annual rate for physician turnover increased by 43 percent between 2010 and 2018, though it decreased slightly in 2020.

Between 2012 and 2022, physicians working in private practices decreased by 13 percent, an American Medical Association report found.

Beginning Oct. 1, Connecticut hospitals will be required to implement several nurse staffing measures including having organized plans on file, establishing a staffing committee and must meet certain reporting requirements or face civil penalties, according to Littler law firm's analysis of a new state law.

Technology is meant to make things easier, but "it's a great irony that when we were on paper charts, things were more efficient," Doug Bruce, MD, chief clinical integration officer at Cleveland-based MetroHealth, recently told Becker's.

There are no national estimates of physician turnover, which makes one new assessment of the rate at which physicians left their practices over a decade noteworthy. 

const trinityScript = document.createElement('script'); trinityScript.setAttribute('fetchpriority', 'high'); trinityScript.src = 'https://trinitymedia.ai/player/trinity/2900013407/?pageURL=' + encodeURIComponent(window.location.href); document.currentScript.parentNode.insertBefore(trinityScript, document.currentScript); Three nurse practitioners are suing the state of California for its restrictions over the use of "doctor," asking the court to prevent enforcement of the law, The Washington Post reported July 18.

American Physician Partners, a medical staffing company based in Brentwood, Tenn., is closing and planning to transition its hospital contracts, according to Bloomberg. 

The number of physician leaders within an organization has expanded alongside healthcare's growing footprint and rising complexity, resulting in a vast patchwork of leaders with different job descriptions, expectations and standards. In the face of all this complexity emerges a simple question with no single, clear answer: What is a "physician leader"?

Cedars-Sinai's organ transplant program had its busiest year on record with 616 successful transplants for better patient outcomes, according to a July 17 news release shared with Becker's.