A recent report ranks Georgia 40th among states on the health of women and children, down three spots from its 2018 ranking. The 2019 United Health Foundation report said among Georgia’s challenges are its high percentage of uninsured women, its low rate of prenatal care before the third trimester, and its low percentage of high school…
Telemedicine offers tremendous breakthroughs in access to medical care. A patient with a chronic health problem in rural Georgia can be seen by a medical specialist hundreds of miles away. The American Medical Association says 15 percent of physicians work in practices that use telemedicine to treat patients at a distant site. This remote-site care…
By Geoff Duncan It’s Christmas morning, and sadly the Atlanta patient is bedridden, unable to spend the most important holiday of the year with family because she has come down with a bad case of the flu. Certainly, there isn’t a doctor’s office nor urgent care clinic open on Christmas. But due to advances in…
This is the first in an occasional series on rural health care in Georgia. These articles are supported by a grant from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation. Dr. Michael Early practices family medicine in Fort Valley. It’s in Peach County, in the farm belt of Central Georgia, and he notes that it’s “a medically…
A closed rural hospital has reopened with a new name and a plan for a bigger development. The former Chestatee Regional Hospital in Dahlonega, the seat of Lumpkin County, is now Northeast Georgia Medical Center Lumpkin. It’s a scaled-down facility that offers an emergency department, inpatient care and other services. It’s part of the Northeast…
Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan told journalists Tuesday that he wants to see transparency on quality of medical care as much as on medical prices. Duncan said there’s a vacuum of information on medical outcomes that he would like to see filled. The lieutenant governor had been in the nation’s capital Monday, attending the ceremony at…
The state said Monday that it has picked Deloitte Consulting as the winner of an almost $2 million consulting contract to develop health care ‘’waivers’’ for Georgia’s Medicaid program and the private insurance market. Deloitte won over five other firms contacted by state officials to solicit proposals. Its bid of $1.92 million was less than…
The head of the federal Medicare and Medicaid agency said Wednesday in Atlanta that the new White House regulation on pharmaceutical TV ads will bring “much-needed pricing transparency to the market for prescription drugs.’’ The new policy, announced Wednesday, will require companies to disclose prices in TV ads for any drugs that will cost above…
Two years ago, Angela Ammons faced a daunting challenge as the new CEO of Clinch Memorial Hospital in Homerville, in South Georgia. It was the RN’s first job as a hospital administrator. The “critical access’’ 25-bed hospital had just three days’ cash on hand, and the predictions were that it would join the ranks of…
This article is published with permission from Rural Health Quarterly, where it first appeared. Lee Whitton is almost unique among his peers at Morehouse School of Medicine. A white male raised in a small town near Chattanooga — he’s a third-year medical student at the Atlanta school, which has a predominantly black and female student…