An analysis in Sunday’s Boston Globe reveals that GOP gubernatorial candidate Charlie Baker is making the most of his deep roots in the health care industry: in a 7-month period, Baker’s campaign has received more than $122,000 from contributors with direct ties to Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, where he formerly served as chief executive officer.

The Globe analysis of Baker’s health care-related campaign contributions also found:

This includes not only $43,000 in contributions from Harvard Pilgrim’s employees, directors, and affiliated companies, but also a broad array of vendors: its accountants, auditing firm, advertising agency, information technology providers, and consultants.

In total, Baker has raised at least $263,000 from employees of health-care providers, other insurers, and related businesses in the health-care sector. That’s about 10 percent of the $2.57 million he has raised overall.

The New York Times reports that President Obama will hold a televised, bi-partisan summit on health care reform at the White House Feb. 25. According to the report:

The president made the announcement in an interview on CBS during the Super Bowl pre-game show. The meeting would mark the first time in the long health care debate that leaders from both sides would be allowed to air their ideas publicly and see if they can find agreement.

Mr. Obama did not say what he was willing to give up in the negotiations or chart a specific legislative strategy for moving a bill through Congress.

“If we can go step by step through a series of these issues and arrive at some agreements, there’s no reason we can’t do this faster than it took last year,” Mr. Obama said in an interview on Sunday afternoon from the White House Library.

Indeed, over the weekend, Obama told Democrats gathered for a DNC meeting, not to simply, “regroup, lick our wounds and try to hang on” during a challenging political season, but to actually press on and find a way to pass health care reform and other programs that would create jobs, according the The Times.

The Boston Globe today unearths the owner of the Newbury Street modeling agency that represented freshly-certified Senator Scott Brown back in the days when he appeared in catalogs more often than in the Capitol.

According to Maggie Trichon, owner the agency Maggie, Inc., Brown was often hired to pose in catalogs as “the young daddy,” or “the young businessman.” And she’s released the photos to prove it. (Don’t worry, none are as racy as the infamous nude shot in Cosmo).

According to the Globe story, Brown’s wife Gail Huff was also represented by the modeling agency, and now his daughter, Arianna, has signed on too.

It may be a new trend in hospital marketing (or maybe not): A hospital system in Ohio has begun advertising emergency room “door-to-doc” wait times on billboards around town and on the Internet, according to the The Akron Beacon Journal.

Wait-times for six local ERs, operated by the Akron General Health System, are updated on digital roadside billboards every 20 minutes, the paper reports, based on current patient information from electronic medical records. The article states:

The campaign is geared toward patients ”who don’t have to call 911 to come in,” said Dr. Nick Jouriles, interim chairman of Akron General’s Department of Emergency Medicine. Patients with chest pain, for example, should call for help, not shop for the shortest wait time.

”We value our patients, and we value our patients’ time,” Jouriles said. ”This is our way of saying, ‘We’re working hard to make our experience better and the time that they have to spend shorter for the same quality care.’ ”

Evan Lyon, MD, an associate physician at the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School, focuses on community-based approaches to HIV and TB treatment. Dr. Lyon, a longtime affiliate of Boston-based Partners in Health, has worked in Haiti since 1996, and recently spent several weeks there just after the earthquake hit. He argues that community health workers, or “accompagnateurs,” should play a key role in rebuilding the country:

Partners In Health (PIH) is not a disaster relief organization. But PIH’s deep roots in Haiti allowed PIH to respond more quickly to provide emergency medical care following the earthquake on January 12 than most disaster-relief organizations. Over the past twenty years, PIH has hired a Haitian staff of more than 4,000, built 12 hospitals and health centers in the Central Plateau and Lower Artibonite Valley, and cultivated a strong working relationship with the Haitian Ministry of Health (MOH).

When the earthquake struck most of our staff was at home, in Haiti. There was no delay or bottleneck getting doctors and nurses to where they were needed most – PIH staff poured into Port-au-Prince to get to work. In the days immediately following the quake, PIH was designated by the World Health Organization (WHO) to “accompany” the recovery of Hôpital Université de l’Etat Haiti (HUEH), the University General Hospital in Port-au-Prince. Standing shoulder to shoulder with our Haitian colleagues, we helped them coordinate the outpouring of international assistance to support their devastated hospital.

PIH dispelled rumors of “insecurity” allowing aid to flow more quickly from the U.N., U.S. military, and other international aid agencies. Also because our 12 facilities (all outside the capital) were largely undamaged by the earthquake, we had the capacity to quickly receive and care for the injured who managed to leave Port-au-Prince. Our facilities in Cange, Hinche, St. Marc, and elsewhere are still overflowing with earthquake related patients.

PIH’s work in Haiti is built around community health workers (CHW), a job in Haitian Creole known as an “accompagnateur.” Accompagnateurs have a deep understanding of the needs and challenges of their own communities and care for patients as if they were their own family members. The CHW model not only helps PIH quickly identify where the needs are and provide proper care, but it also gives community members a means to provide for their families, at a time when jobs and food and water are scarce.

Half of PIH’s employees are already CHWs, and in the wake of the earthquake, PIH has hired dozens more to work on mobile teams that are providing medical care and essential supplies in the tent cities across Port-au-Prince. By injecting resources directly into communities, PIH is helping boost local communities and reaching thousands of people in need. Read more…

Maureen Corry, executive director of the non-profit research and advocacy organization, Childbirth Connection, offers recommendations for a revamped system of excellent care for new mothers and babies, at an appropriate cost:

With the seemingly endless furor over health care reform, you wouldn’t think a well-planned roadmap toward health care nirvana already existed. At least it does when it comes to maternity care – the number one reason for hospitalization.

Last week, Childbirth Connection released two reports that are the fruit of over two years’ labor by more than 100 maternity care leaders representing every industry stakeholder – from hospitals and health plans to consumers, quality experts and providers. The “2020 Vision for a High-Quality, High-Value Maternity Care System” and “Blueprint for Action” lay out the values of and recommendations for a maternity care system in which women receive high quality evidence-based care at an appropriate cost.

Maternity care is the sweet spot for what we all want: high quality, high value care. It’s one of the only sectors of the health care industry where less care often means better care. Most mothers experience interventions that are inappropriate to use routinely among the population of primarily young and healthy women who give birth to 4.3 million babies each year. And while we spend so much more on health care, our performance lags distantly behind other developed nations on quality indicators including low birthweight, prematurity and maternal death. (See the USA Today stories “High-tech interventions deliver huge childbirth bill” and “Maternity-care failings can be remedied with cost-saving fixes.”)

Similar to what the Institute of Medicine’s Crossing the Quality Chasm did to define high quality health care, the 2020 Vision presents a shared view of fundamental values, principles and attributes that constitute a high quality maternity care system. The Blueprint provides detailed recommendations and action steps developed by five stakeholder workgroups to achieve the Vision. Specific strategies in 11 critical areas are outlined and answer the question: “Who needs to do what, to, with, and for whom to improve the quality of maternity care over the next five years?”

The reports are only the first step in a concerted effort to transform maternity care. We’ve established a public-private multi-stakeholder partnership to carry out the next phase of our initiative and implement Blueprint steps to accelerate health system change. The potential to improve maternity care is within our reach, but we can’t do it alone. There’s much to learn from those who have successfully implemented maternity care QI programs. We call upon them to share their knowledge and experiences and invite others that want to make change to get in touch with us.

Health care reform offers many opportunities, but with or without it, there’s work to be done to ensure optimal care for women and newborns. The Vision and Blueprint are tools we can use now to build a maternity care system that works.

A Few Highlights of Blueprint Recommendations:

Performance Measurement
Fill in gaps to attain a complete set of nationally endorsed consensus measures to assess maternity care performance across the full episode of maternity care, including outcomes and value of care, and experiences of women and families. Read more…

Barbara Hagan, a former state representative from Manchester, NH and self-described “right to life activist,” awaits Wednesday’s vote on a controversial hospital acquisition:

The clock is ticking in New Hampshire over the secular Dartmouth Hitchcock Health’s controversial takeover of Catholic Medical Center in Manchester. Although the New Hampshire attorney general has 120 days to review the merger proposal, filed on January 21st, that review may be coming to an abrupt end. A resolution approved by the Legislature’s Commerce Committee to refer the matter to Probate Court goes before the full New Hampshire House of Representatives for a vote on Wednesday, February 3.

If the House votes in favor, Catholic Medical Center’s CEO Allison Pitman will no longer be able to hide behind semantics, empty promises and blanket denials. CMC will be confronted by a reality it has yet to face: a thorough legal review. CMC and DHH will be forced to answer questions candidly under oath. Calling an acquisition an “affiliation” as they have done for six months, will not play as well in the court room as it does on talk radio. The Probate Court can review CMC and Dartmouth’s plans to create a statewide healthcare giant that dominates healthcare consumers from Boston to the Canadian border, forces increased costs on New Hampshire residents and businesses and limits choices for patients.

Meanwhile, a group of concerned Catholics have appealed to Vatican offices to stop the takeover and preserve a Catholic healthcare option in new Hampshire. The state’s Catholic community continues to be ill-served by a bishop whose punishment for making a mess of things in Boston was to be sent to New Hampshire to create new controversies. Bishop John McCormack’s tacit approval of this merger from the start has been about as genuine as Pontius Pilate’s hand-washing.

Soon enough, the clock will stop ticking, and the bell will toll. The only question left is when, since we Catholics know better than to ask for whom.

The Boston Globe reports that the British medical journal, The Lancet, retracted a flawed study that linked autism and other problems to childhood vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella.

The study, by the controversial (and now officially discredited) doctor Andrew Wakefield, was one of the key documents to launch the anti-vaccine movement among parents in the U.K and the U.S. The Globe states:

Last week, Britain’s General Medical Council ruled that Wakefield had shown a “callous disregard” for the children used in his study and acted unethically. Wakefield and the two colleagues who have not renounced the study face being stripped of their right to practice medicine in Britain.

For the study, Wakefield took blood samples from children at his son’s birthday party, paying them 5 pounds each ($8) for their contributions and later joking about the incident.

And in her Motherlode blog in the New York Times, Lisa Belkin offers a post by a mom frustrated by false promises that children with autism can be “cured” (see also, actrees turned autism-cure crusader, Jenny McCarthy).

A number of health care experts assess the chances of President Obama and Congress enacting a revamped health industry overhaul. These analyses, pulled together by Kaiser Health News, include an historical look at reform attempts in the mid-1990s under President Clinton, as well as Obama’s direct plea to Republicans on a YouTube-sponsored Q&A to keep negotiations moving forward. The Wall Street Journal quotes Obama saying:

“We had this enormous opportunity, but the way the rules work in the United States Senate, you’ve got to have 60 votes for everything. After the special election in Massachusetts, we now only have 59. We are calling on our Republican colleagues to get behind a serious health reform bill, one that actually provides not only the insurance reforms for people who do have health insurance but also the coverage for folks who don’t. My hope is, is that they accept that invitation and that they work with us together over the next several weeks to get it done.”

Here’s the story of a 53-year-old woman with breast cancer who decided to move to England to gain access to affordable treatment. Erika Rex, writing for Kaiser Health News, says after dating a British man for less than a year, she left New York for the U.K, and into the open arms of the National Health Service, where she encountered poetry in the doctor’s waiting room, free prescription drugs and a truly compassionate physician. Rex writes:

I had some wonderful doctors in New York, caring and helpful. But I also had to fight with my hospital there to get the tests I needed, and several of the specialists were so difficult to deal with I chose medical protocols to avoid them—no matter what the best option for treatment was. What I really notice about the health care providers in England is that they seem to have more than half a second for me – and they actually listen.