At the hospital i worked at, the state flips the bill for indigent people if they qualify for the aid. otherwise, the fee for hospital stays covers everything that the patient "may need" some patients may not require as much meds/monitoring as others but pay the same fee which in turns covers the lost fee from non payers. The hosptial is getting paid one way or another.
waste of resources... 8 organ transplant
- Thread starter peiserg
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peiserg said:
I don't really want to get into this debate, but will mention something interesting. As a little background, a friend of mine works for UNOS so through him I have learned a lot about the way the whole thing works. Their UNet matching system is amazing. It is one of the more sohpistocated real-time custom database applications I've seen.
It is somewhat bizarre in that you can sit there in their headquarters and watch the matches taking place on a computer screen in real time. Real people living and dying, getting the organ that may save their life, all just a bunch of information moving around on a computer screen. You can click on any of them and see all their details. Additionally, information is regularly entered into the system which changes the matching queues. For example if a patient dies before receiving a transplant, they have to get him off the waiting list so an organ is not allocated to him instead of the next person in queue. A patient waiting for a heart may suffer another cardiac event and get bumped up in priority as a result of new damage to his old heart. And obviously any mistakes can have dire consquences, both as far as data entry mistakes or bugs in the software. They also collect follow-up data and keep information on the outcome of patients after they receive a transplant.
Their level of systems redundancy is also unmatched in my experience outside of some major government and financial operations. They are way beyond generator backup power. Pretty much every important system has a hot spare in-house and another hot spare at an off-site location. All the data is replicated in real time to the emergency backup facility, so if they ever they have to switch locations it will be seamless. They have data circuits coming in from different tier-1 providers and they even went so far as to pull them in from different POPs so a single cable cut or other failure at one POP will not take them down.
Anyway, their operation is simply amazing. They have huge amounts of money to throw at everything. They hire good people and pay them extremely well. Not many organizations can afford the level of redundancy they have at their main location and then duplicate all of it once again at an off-site facility. The main UNOS website is http://www.unos.org and anyone interested can learn more about their database system and even run queries on a subset of the data here: http://www.optn.org
It's also amazing how heavily politicized organ transplant has become at the policy level. I don't know enough about it to comment, but it's amazing how involved the whole thing is. I guess that is the case with anything related to health care these days.
Anyway, my comment in response to the above quote was simply that, in the US, more organs are donated by non-citizens than are transplanted into non-citizens. I don't know whether you already knew this or not, or if not whether that changes how you feel about the situation. As I said I'm not looking to get into this debate, but I just thought I'd mention it since most people are not aware of that fact.
I am. This thread is a little too much like work, but there have been some good comments made. IMHO, our health care problems will not be solved until we get some meaningful tort reform and decrease the number of patients on Medicare,and other federal programs. I feel bad every time I have to hospitalize a 90 year-old with end-stage dementia because that's what the family wants and the lawyers demand.
Lud,
if it is true that people outside the system donate more organs than citizens, then i retract my rant.
and yes i agree about throwing everything including the kitchen sink at 90 year old demented patients. heh. as i sit here, typing away, i am awaiting the orthopoedic surgeon so i can put my 92 year old severely demented patient to sleep for a bipolar hip repair. she does not talk, and is practically curled into a little ball, contracted to all hell. Sure you can't just decide "no hip for you!" but realistically, she doesn't walk anyway, and won't even remember being in the hospital, so what's the point?
*sigh* one day that's gonna be me i suppose...with some young punk bitching about putting "the old demented bastard to sleep... i heard he used to have a supercharged NSX.. can you beleive that???"
if it is true that people outside the system donate more organs than citizens, then i retract my rant.
and yes i agree about throwing everything including the kitchen sink at 90 year old demented patients. heh. as i sit here, typing away, i am awaiting the orthopoedic surgeon so i can put my 92 year old severely demented patient to sleep for a bipolar hip repair. she does not talk, and is practically curled into a little ball, contracted to all hell. Sure you can't just decide "no hip for you!" but realistically, she doesn't walk anyway, and won't even remember being in the hospital, so what's the point?
*sigh* one day that's gonna be me i suppose...with some young punk bitching about putting "the old demented bastard to sleep... i heard he used to have a supercharged NSX.. can you beleive that???"
