"Health & Medical News"

The Florida Supreme Court ignored decades of peer review protections when it ruled March 6 to allow patients to examine records on past adverse medical incidents, physicians and hospital organizations say.

The 4-3 high court decision says a state constitutional amendment giving patients access to records related to adverse medical incidents applies retroactively and opens up related peer review documents created before the amendment passed via ballot measure in November 2004.

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Washington — The race for Florida’s 15th Congressional District is adding new meaning to the term “physician choice.”

Rep. Dave Weldon, MD (R, Fla.), an internist running for his seventh term in the district, located southeast of Orlando, is being challenged by political newcomer and Democrat Stephen Blythe, DO. A family physician, Dr. Blythe admits he faces an uphill battle in the conservative-leaning area.

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Washington — Medicaid recipients in Tallahassee and surrounding Leon County are the test subjects for a bold Florida experiment: a pilot program giving them their own electronic health records.

The initiative, administered by Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration, runs from November to February 2008 and seeks to create EHRs for each of the 25,000 Medicaid recipients in Leon County, said Peter Finney, program manager of the Electronic Health Records Center of Excellence for Electronic Data Systems, a Plano, Texas, information technology corporation.

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Delray Beach, Fla., located between Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, has emerged as the country’s largest and most vibrant recovery community, with many halfway houses and 5,000 people a week attending 12-step meetings, the New York Times reported on Nov. 16.

The recovery community in Delray Beach exists well beyond the walls of the community’s rehabilitation centers, with recovery radio shows, a recovery motorcycle club, and a coffeehouse with its own therapy group. Because it is a compact area, recovering people cross paths daily along the shops and bistros of Atlantic Avenue, oblivious to the tourists and “normies,” their term for sober people not in recovery.

Popularity: unranked [?]