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Morgellons Disease

Morgellons is a rare and very unusual disease that is affecting more and more people. It is a multi-symptom disease that is now just being researched, even though the first modern case showed up in a 2 year old boy in the year 2001. It was in 1674 the first actual case was reported, although it was misdiagnosed. Often it is diagnosed as Delusional Parasitosis. Morgellons Disease is often overlooked by doctors because they are simply unaware of it, or have yet to understand it.

Morgellons Disease is a parasite-like infection that literally makes a person feel like their skin is crawling. So far it has been mostly diagnosed in Florida, California, and Texas but every state has reported at least one case. It has also been reported in Japan, The Philippines, Australia, Indonesia, Europe, and South Africa. Thousands of people have Morgellons Disease and yet no one can figure out how the person gets it, or if it is even contagious.
The symptoms are intense and painful. They include:
- Non-healing skin lesions with highly unusual structures
- Sensations of bugs crawling, stinging, and biting under their skin
- Joint pain
- Decline in vision
- Appear of blue fibers and granules that look like sand coming out of the skin
- Fatigue which can be diagnosed as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
- Short term memory loss
- Brain fog – Impaired thought processing
- Attention Deficit disorder
- Bipolar or Obsessive Compulsive Disorders

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Health information exchange set to begin testing
Monday, January 21, 2008
By James Schlett (Contact)
Gazette Reporter

A three-year effort to break down the walls that hinder Capital Region medical practitioners’ ability to review patient information will soon enter the testing phases.
The Health Information Exchange of New York will start sending test data across its network later this month — a prerequisite to the regionwide sharing of prescription, laboratory and other electronic information over a secure Web-based platform. By August, HIXNY expects at least four of its 21 members to launch a new era of medical information exchange in the region.
“What HIXNY does is it enables the mobilization of health care information” across medical organizations, said HIXNY CEO Dominick Bizzarro.
By enhancing medical facilities’ interoperability, health care officials hope they can supply doctors with vital data immediately. That data should reduce the likelihood of errors due to medical decisions made with incomplete information. To obtain that information, doctors must currently call neighboring hospitals and have documents faxed to them.
“If we put better information in physicians’ hands quickly, they’re going to be able to make better decisions,” said Bizzarro, who took the top seat at HIXNY last month. He previously held executive positions at Enfrastructure Technologies in Clifton Park and PharMerica in Tampa, Fla.
Preparation for the clinical information exchange started in 2005, when chief information officers at six area hospitals, practices and health plans formed a task force charged with coordinating the interoperability effort. A year later, the state Department of Health awarded HIXNY a $1.7 million grant to create the clinical information data exchange.
The early adaptors of the HIXNY system will be Northeast Health and Seton Health in Troy, Prime Care Physicians in Albany and Community Care Physicians in Latham. They will be followed by Ellis Hospital and St. Claire’s Hospital in Schenectady, Saratoga Hospital in Saratoga Springs and St. Mary’s Hospital in Amsterdam.

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CAPITAL REGION
New health data-sharing network to be tested
BY JAMES SCHLETT Gazette Reporter
Reach Gazette reporter James Schlett at 395-3040 or jschlett@dailygazette.net.

    A three-year effort to break down the walls that hinder Capital Region medical practitioners’ ability to review patient information will soon enter the testing phases.
    The Health Information Exchange of New York later this month will start sending test data across its network — a prerequisite to the regionwide sharing of prescription, laboratory and other electronic information over a secure Web-based platform.
    “If we can keep the momentum going, we should be able to start sharing information by summer,” said Ellis Hospital Chief Information Officer William Young, He is also HIXNY’s vice chairman.
    By August, HIXNY expects at least four of its 21 members to launch a new era of medical information exchange in the region.
    By enhancing medical facilities’ interoperability, health care officials hope they can supply doctors with vital data immediately. That data should reduce the likelihood of errors due to medical decisions made with incomplete information. To obtain patient data, doctors must currently call neighboring hospitals and have documents faxed to them.
    “If we put better information in physicians’ hands quickly, they’re going to be able to make better decisions,” said Dominick Bizzarro, who last month became the chief executive at HIXNY, a regional health information organization, or RHIO. He previously held executive positions at Enfrastructure Technologies in Clifton Park and PharMerica in Tampa, Fla.
    Preparation work for the clinical information exchange started in 2005, when chief information officers at six area hospitals, practices and health plans formed a task force charged with coordinating the interoperability effort. A year later, the state Department of Health awarded HIXNY a $1.7 million grant to create the clinical information data exchange.
    The early adapters of the HIXNY system will be Northeast Health and Seton Health in Troy plus Prime Care Physicians in Albany and Community Care Physicians in Latham. They will be followed by Ellis Hospital and St. Clare’s Hospital in Schenectady, Saratoga Hospital in Saratoga Springs and St. Mary’s Hospital in Amsterdam, Bizzarro said.
    “We’re pretty ready to test it. It’s not ready for prime time,” said Dr. John Collins, the chief medical officer of Northeast, the health care facility network that includes Albany Memorial Hospital, Samaritan Hospital in Troy and Sunnyview Rehabilitation Hospital in Schenectady. He also sits on HIXNY’s board of directors.
    HIXNY’s summer pilot will mark the region’s latest advancement in the electronic medical record field, which aims to replace paper medical documents with digitalized information. It will also bring the region closer to fulfilling President Bush’s goal — detailed in 2004 — of creating a coastto-coast infrastructure that would allow doctors to electronically share medical information about patients.
    A nationwide EMR systems could result in $77.8 billion in savings annually, according to the Center for Information Technology Leadership, a Boston information technology research organization. HIXNY is already in talks to share its electronic health information with the Adirondack Regional Community Health Information Exchange, a RHIO based in Glens Falls.
    “Once we’re good at sharing information locally or regionally then it would be good to share it throughout upstate,” said Collins.
    In the past four years, local health care officials have revved up their EMR adoption efforts. The EMR implantation initiatives have traditionally started in hospital emergency rooms and spread from there. But to date most of the EMR initiatives have occurred within enclosed health care networks, which restrict access from outside physicians.
    For example, Albany Memorial in 2005 launched a computerized order entry network, which enables physicians to electronically prescribe prescriptions and laboratory tests. Northeast last November launched a picture archiving communications, which stores, retrieves, distributes and presents digital MRI, mammography and other medical images. Northeast is also expanding its EMR capabilities to its nine outpatient doctors’ offices.
    “One way to think of it is building from the grassroots up,” said Capital District Physicians’ Health Plan Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer Dr. Bruce Nash, who sits on HIXNY’s board.
    CDPHP has encouraged many of its 9,000 member providers to adopt EMR systems. Bruce said that push is crucial because a significant amount of patient information gets recorded in doctors’ offices.
    Over the last three years, CDPHP has invested $4.5 million in EMR adoption, interoperability and education initiatives. At its third annual health information technology e-Forum in Colonie on Saturday, CDPHP pledged to invest another $1 million for EMR adoption, primarily among small practices with fewer than five doctors.
    While 57 percent of CDPHP’s medium and large member practices with over fi ve doctors have adopted EMR systems, only 17 percent of its small practices have that technology, Nash said.
    One of the biggest changes RHIOs such as ARCHIE and HIXNY face is in developing procedures for information sharing that do not compromise patient confidentiality. Patients must consent to allowing a doctor to obtain their medical records from outside medical organizations, though in extreme emergencies that information can be acquired without such authorization.
    The Health Information Security and Privacy Collaboration recently made recommendations on information sharing procedure standards.

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The Health Information Exchange of New York

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“It’s a lot tougher to answer the question ‘what does that mean for the people in the communities where the distribution is changing?’”

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Insurer pushes plan to go public
Doctors warn shareholders’ needs may trump those of patients
BY JAMES SCHLETT Gazette Reporter
Reach Gazette reporter James Schlett at 395-3040 or jschlett@dailygazette.net.

    A giant downstate nonprofit health insurer is pushing to become a publicly traded venture, making some Capital Region doctors concerned that the proposed conversion will encourage company executives to view patients as cash cows.
    The state Insurance Department on Thursday hosted its second public hearing on EmblemHealth’s proposal to become a for-profit insurer. Emblem is the New York parent company of Group Health Inc. and the Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York.
    Saying they are financially outgunned in the increasingly for-profit downstate health insurance market, Emblem executives said they need access to public capital to make necessary investments in technology, products and services. Their first public hearing was held in New York on Tuesday.
    The bid to go public is the latest evolution for GHI and HIP, which in 2005 announced plans to merge. Since then, they have affi liated under Emblem. The health plans date back to 1937 and 1947, respectively.
    Together, GHI and HIP cover more than 4 million New Yorkers, including 321,000 in the Mid-Hudson Valley and Capital Region. Many of those members are state workers and retirees who receive behavioral health and dental coverage.
    “Our future stability depends on our ability to compete,” said Emblem Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Anthony Watson.
    As a nonprofit, Emblem’s options for capital project financing is limited to taking it from surplus funds or borrowing. That corporate structure puts Emblem at a significant disadvantage to for-profit competitors, such as Aetna, Cigna and United Healthcare, according to company officials.
    As a public company, Emblem would have access to the equity capital markets that could furnish it with vastly more funding avenues.
    But area physicians expressed skepticism about the motives behind Emblem’s privatization bid. They warned the needs of shareholders could trump those of patients if the insurer went public.
    Emblem President and Chief Operating Officer Frank Branchini said public capital would enable the insurer to improve its customer services, though he also said the company would reduce its workforce, mostly through attrition.
    “My patients expect me to take care of them, not to make a profit off of them,” said Dr. Paul Sorum, chairman of the Albany chapter of the Physicians for a National Health Program.
    The last New York nonprofit health insurer that became a for-profit company was Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield. But three years after its initial public offering in 2002, Empire parent WellChoice was acquired by WellPoint, an Indianapolis-based rival with 34 million members nationwide.
    WellPoint, United, Aetna and Cigna now control 72 percent of downstate’s commercial market. Throughout New York, for-profit insurers control 50 percent of that market.
    Emblem’s downstate market share is 19 percent and it is 12 percent statewide. Its proposed merger and privatization drew the support of the New York Health Plan Association, an Albany trade organization that represents 30 health plans.
    “They’re trying to survive in a for-profi t market,” said Health Plan Association President Paul Macielak.
    As a for-profit insurer, Watson said Emblem would broaden its coverage statewide and attempt to wrangle from the Minneapolis-based United a contract to serve as the administrator of the Empire Plan, the main health plan for state workers.
    Insurance Department Superintendent Eric Dinallo would be “sounding our death knell” if he rejects Emblem’s proposal, Watson said.
    However, Dr. Arnold Ritterband, chairman of the Schenectady County Committee of Health Care Issues and co-medical director of the Schenectady Free Health Clinic, said public health insurers are dooming quality care for patients. He said the merger and privatization of GHI and HIP would put too much emphasis on profi ts. He also noted the $10 million-plus salaries for chief executives at insurers such as United and Aetna.
    “The more corporatized medical care has become, the more compromised it has become,” said Barbara Doty, a Thompson Lake, Orange County, resident whose 23-year-old son is awaiting his third kidney transplant.
    Although Doty’s son is not covered by GHI or HIP, she has grown frustrated with the prevalence of a bottom-line mentality at hospitals and health plans.

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“The more corporatized medical care has become, the more compromised it has become,” said Barbara Doty, a Thompson Lake, Orange County, resident whose 23-year-old son is awaiting his third kidney transplant.
    Although Doty’s son is not covered by GHI or HIP, she has grown frustrated with the prevalence of a bottom-line mentality at hospitals and health plans.

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U.S. cancer deaths up by 5,400 in 2005
The Associated Press

    ATLANTA — U.S. cancer deaths rose by more than 5,000 in 2005, a somewhat disappointing reversal of a two-year downward trend, the American Cancer Society said in a report issued Wednesday.
    The group counted 559,312 people who died from cancer.
    The cancer death rate among the overall population continued to fall, but only slightly, after a couple of years of more dramatic decline.
    In 2005, there were just under 184 cancer deaths per 100,000 people, down from nearly 186 the previous year. Experts said it wasn’t surprising that the rate would stabilize.
    The cancer death rate has been dropping since the early 1990s, and early in this decade was declining by about 1 percent a year. The actual number of cancer deaths kept rising, however, because of the growing population.
    So it was big news when the rate dropped by 2 percent in both 2003 and 2004, enough to cause the total number of cancer deaths to fall for the first time since 1930.
    President George W. Bush and others hailed that as a sign that federally funded research was making strides against the disease.
    But now the death rate decline is back to 1 percent. And the 2005 numbers show annual cancer deaths are no longer falling, but are up more than 5,400 since 2004.
    “The declining rate was no longer great enough to overcome the increase in population,” said Elizabeth Ward, a co-author of the cancer society report
    Officials with the organization say they don’t know why the decline in the death rate eased.
    It may be that cancer screenings are not having as big an effect as they were a few years ago, said Dr. Peter Ravdin, a research professor in biostatistics at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
    One possible example: In 2004, the largest drop in deaths among the major cancers was in colorectal cancer.
    Experts gave much of the credit to colonoscopy screenings that detect polyps and allow doctors to remove them before they turn cancerous. They also mentioned “the Katie Couric effect” — a jump in colonoscopy rates after the “Today” show host had the exam on national television in 2000.
    In the new report, the colorectal cancer death rate decreased by about 3 percent from 2004 to 2005, after plunging 6 percent from 2003 to 2004.