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This is to honor the nurses of America.  You are the women, and the men who staff our hospitals, tend the sick, comfort the dying, perform triage at disaster sites and emergency rooms, and manage the hundreds of details that make modern medicine function.

This is your week — National Nurses Week — the seven days when the hundreds of millions of us, thank the 3.1 million of you for being there when we need you.

It’s amazing that it took almost three decades from the first seed of a suggestion that nurses should have a special day to the Congressional act declaring May 6th National Recognition Day for Nurses. In 1990, the day became a week that now includes May 8th as National Student Nurses Day.

Nursing has come a long way from the days when Florence Nightingale made her nighttime rounds of injured soldiers during the Crimean War. The work is still demanding, the material rewards are better, but it is the calling that is still the same. “God,” wrote Nightingale, “called me in the morning and asked me would I do good for him alone without reputation.” Read the rest of this entry »

Based on how frequently the job turns up in online ads, physical therapists are the most in-demand job of any posted anywhere online. Wanted Technologies, an online data analysis firm, says employers posted more than 11,600 jobs online for physical therapists in March. It’s the highest number of ads seen in any single month since October 2009, and represents a 19% increase over March 2011. The biggest demand is in the Washington, DC area where 916 jobs for physical therapists were posted in March, a 205% increase from a year before. Wanted says the average time these jobs remained online was seven weeks, a sign of how hard they are to fill. Wanted Analytics

“The average cost to a company for the health care of an employee is $12,000,” says futurist and business adviser David Houle. That high cost, the result of American healthcare’s focus on cures, not prevention, is handicapping business in the global marketplace.

With 70% of healthcare costs going to treat just 10% of the population, Houle maintains that a change in approach to medical care is both necessary and about to occur.

Today, insurers pay for procedures and not prevention; there are 18,000 billing codes for treatment, he says, and “not a single code for payment on keeping a patient healthy.” “That is about to change. Primary care physicians, the ones who know the patient best, will become central to the new health care delivery system and will actually get paid for doing what they are supposed to do, keep their patients healthy.” Read the rest of this entry »

Healthcare providers will have to give their patients access to electronic health records (EHRs), and get them to use the digital technology, under government rules announced last month. The so-called Stage 2 rules, if adopted after the comment period, which is currently underway, will require clinics and private practices to also prove at least 10% of their patients are actually accessing healthcare information on EHRs. The details were announced by the government’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services as it pushes forward on the broader EHR implementation initiative. Computerworld

Not that long ago, all the buzz in healthcare was about the nursing shortage. Hospitals, skilled care facilities, medical offices, not to mention those other providers we don’t generally think of — insurers and public health centers among them; it seems everyone was hunting nurses.

Today, the nursing shortage has eased, though jobs – both permanent and temporary – for experienced nurses with special skills still remain. Elsewhere in healthcare, the demand is as high as ever. As a whole, the industry is expanding rapidly with demand for professionals and skilled workers (and even entry-level) approaching record levels. Read the rest of this entry »

Like Apple fans worldwide, the medical community is counting down to Friday’s release of the iPad 3. But unlike most fans, healthcare professionals have some very specific reasons to be excited about the latest version of the wildly popular tablet. That is, besides its faster, more powerful computer brain. Radiologists, and any healthcare professional who relies on imaging for any part of their job, will appreciate the incredibly sharp screen resolution Apples calls “retina display.” At 2048 x 1536 think HDTV. And though it won’t have Siri, the curiously compelling spoken natural language assistant, the iPad 3 has voice dictation, a boon for nurses, office assistants, as well as busy doctors who can dictate while on the go. More on the healthcare applications of the new iPad can be found at iMedicalApps.

Temporary workers and staffing agency hiring drove a big part of February’s 227,000 new jobs, according to the report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It’s the third consecutive month of job increases over 200,000. The numbers of new jobs created exceeded what most economists were expecting, even if the 8.3% unemployment rate was expected.

“The labor market has found its legs in the last few months,” said Julia Coronado, chief economist for North America at BNP Paribas in New York.She told MarketWatch, “it looks like there’s enough of a broad base that the momentum can be sustained.” Read the rest of this entry »

The nursing shortage may be easing, but demand for other healthcare professionals is growing with no letup in sight.

In the 12 months from January 2011 to January 2012, the healthcare industry added 312,500 jobs. That’s almost a sixth of all the new jobs the economy created. Hospitals alone accounted for some 96,000 of the new healthcare jobs. The number of jobs in physician offices — and that includes positions from receptionist, to billers, records clerks, physician assistants, technicians, patient counselors — grew by almost 65,000.

While hiring is keen across the board, one often overlooked area is suffering from a shortage of candidates. Healthcare management positions are expanding along with the industry, in part due to the aging population, but also to prepare for the federal health insurance program that will provide care to millions of now uninsured Americans. Read the rest of this entry »

Could be that the days of in-house R&D by the big pharmaceutical companies are waning, and outsourcing (in a sense) the development of new drugs is rising.

That’s more or less what Sanofi CEO Chris Viehbacher told journalists during the CED Life Sciences Conference last month. In a novel — for Big Pharma — deal, Sanofi partnered with a venture capital firm to launch a biotech firm. Warp Drive Bio will develop natural product drugs while Sanofi may handle the licensing and marketing. Read the rest of this entry »

Big pharma is going through so profound a marketplace change that alone in the life sciences industry the sector views the future with uncertainty, hesitant to take the plunge on training and performance management to achieve the customer-centric approach its leaders claim they want.

Hay Group consultants say that even after making deep cuts in their sales force the last few years, half of all pharmaceutical companies believe they are still overstaffed. Many report plans to make further reductions ranging from 6% to 15%.

A report in Pharm Exec by Hay Group practice leaders and authors of the 2011 Annual Study of Sales Force Effectiveness talks about the “dramatic structural change” in the pharmaceutical marketplace and Big Pharma’s response. Read the rest of this entry »