Kim Ingram woke up at 5:30 a.m. Monday and saw the snow piled about 8 inches high at her Rabun County home. “This may be the big one,’’ she said to herself. It took 25 minutes for Ingram’s four-wheel drive to crawl the five miles to Mountain Lakes Medical Center, where she is CEO. The…
Anita LaTourette, a dental hygienist, travels to elementary schools and works on hundreds of Georgia children every year. Through a public health program, LaTourette cleans teeth, removing bacteria, and applies sealants and fluoride treatments to students on the free-and-reduced-lunch program. “A lot of the children have not seen a dentist,’’ she says. “We’re their dental…
ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative news organization, has created a web tool for consumers to dig into the quality of care at individual dialysis clinics. There are 269 such facilities in Georgia, and the tool gives you information such as mortality rates, infection rates, and hospitalizations. The data were collected by contractors for the federal Centers…
Marjean Birt regularly walks four blocks from her home to visit her husband of 54 years, Lucas, at Dogwood Forest assisted living facility in Alpharetta. “We appreciate it so much and think it’s a wonderful facility,’’ she says. On Wednesday, Birt took a much longer trip, traveling to downtown Atlanta to testify at a public…
A suburban building boom is extending Kaiser Permanente’s geographic spread across metro Atlanta. The California-based nonprofit health plan says it’s adding new medical offices early in 2011 in Conyers and Fayetteville. Those two centers, along with one in downtown Atlanta, would make 11 new Kaiser medical clinic openings in a little more than a year….
One week after biochemist Clive Slaughter taught first-year medical students why a paper cut grows red and puffy as it heals, they couldn’t remember the specifics. So the associate professor at Medical College of Georgia’s new satellite campus in Athens ransacked medical databases looking for vivid photos that would help make lessons on wound healing…
The Good News Clinics began treating low-income patients in a community center at a Gainesville housing project in 1992. Now, in a location that resembles a regular doctor’s office, Good News is the largest full-service free clinic in Georgia, handling more than 1,500 medical and dental visits every month. The rise in the number of…
Recent departures of CEOs at three large urban health systems created big waves within the Georgia hospital industry. At the same time, though with less public attention, an even bigger exodus of hospital CEOs has rocked rural areas of the state. A new survey shows that one of every three CEO positions at Georgia rural…
Louisville, Ky.-based Humana has agreed to buy Concentra, based in Texas, in an interesting marriage of a health insurer with a provider of urgent care and occupational medicine. Concentra has 13 centers in Georgia, 11 of them in the metro Atlanta area. Here is the Wall Street Journal‘s story on the $790 million deal.
Betty Brown, 87, has lived in a Kennesaw assisted living facility for 11 months. But she has now lost the ability to propel her wheelchair by herself, and her son says that because of that change, state rules could soon force Betty to enter a nursing home.