FRAMINGHAM, Mass. (AP) — Staples Inc. says nearly 1.2 million customer payment cards may have been exposed during a security breach earlier this year.

The office supply retailer said in October that it was looking into a potential credit card breach, adding to a long list of retailers recently hit by cyberattacks.

Staples said Friday that an investigation shows that the criminals used malware that may have allowed access to information for transactions at 115 of its U.S. stores. That includes cardholder names, payment card numbers, expiration dates and card verification codes.

The Framingham, Massachusetts-based company is offering free identity protection services, including credit monitoring, to customers who might be at risk.

The security breach affected different stores at different times between July and September.

Hutchinson, KS – Thursday in Hugoton, Congressman Tim Huelskamp (KS-01) hosted his 64th Town Hall of 2014. By hosting 267 Town Halls since 2011, he has continued the tradition of holding a Town Hall in every county of the Big First District each year. Huelskamp has hosted more in-person Town Halls than any other U.S. House member since his arrival to Congress.

During his final Town Hall of 2014, Kansans shared their concerns about the President’s lawless amnesty, the out-of-control spending in D.C., the reckless EPA over-regulations, and the misguided Lesser Prairie Chicken listing.

In response, Rep. Huelskamp issued the following statement thanking the many Kansans who attended the Town Halls in 2014:

“After 267 Town Halls, I am still listening – listening to the concerns of Kansans and taking them back to Washington. It is important to meet and hear from Kansans face-to-face. Far too often, politicians and bureaucrats in Washington do too much talking and not enough listening.

Thank you to the many Kansans who attended the Town Halls and shared with me their concerns, hopes and fears about Washington – let’s hope D.C. listens to us more in 2015.”

DETROIT (AP) — After resisting for several weeks, Chrysler is bowing to government demands to expand a recall of driver’s side air bag inflators across the entire nation.

The company says in a statement Friday that it will recall nearly 2.9 million older cars and trucks across the U.S., as demanded by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The recall includes Chrysler’s most popular model, the Ram pickup, from the 2004 through 2007 model years.

The vehicles have driver’s air bags equipped with inflators made by Japan’s Takata Corp. The inflators can explode with too much force and spew shrapnel at drivers and passengers.

The recall previously was limited to Hawaii, Florida, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

The government demanded that five automakers expand recalls. BMW is now the lone holdout.

By Jordan Rau
Kaiser Health News

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In its toughest crackdown yet on medical errors, the federal government is cutting payments to 721 hospitals for having high rates of infections and other patient injuries, records released Thursday show.

Medicare assessed these new penalties against some of the most renowned hospitals in the nation, including the Cleveland Clinic, Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pa. Eleven Kansas hospitals are among those being penalized.
One out of every seven hospitals in the nation will have their Medicare payments lowered by 1 percent over the fiscal year that began Oct. 1 and continues through September 2015. The health law mandates the reductions for the quarter of hospitals that Medicare assessed as having the highest rates of “hospital-acquired conditions,” or HACs. These conditions include infections from catheters, blood clots, bed sores and other complications that are considered avoidable.

The penalties are falling particularly hard on academic medical centers: Roughly half of them will be punished, according to a Kaiser Health News analysis.

Dr. Eric Schneider, a Boston health researcher who has interviewed patient safety experts for his studies, said research has demonstrated that medical errors can be reduced through a number of techniques. But “there’s a pretty strong sense among the experts we talked to that they are not widely implemented,” he said. Those methods include entering physician orders into computers rather than scrawling them on paper, better hand hygiene and checklists on procedures to follow during surgeries. “Too many clinicians fail to use those techniques consistently,” he said.

The penalties come as the hospital industry is showing some success in reducing avoidable errors. A recent federal report found the frequency of mistakes dropped by 17 percent between 2010 and 2013, an improvement U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell called “a big deal, but it’s only a start.” Even with the reduction, one in eight hospital admissions in 2013 included a patient injury, according to the report from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, or AHRQ.
he new penalties are harsher than any prior government effort to reduce patient harm. Since 2008, Medicare has refused to pay hospitals for the cost of treating patients who suffer avoidable complications. Legally, Medicare can expel a hospital with high rates of errors from its program, but that punishment is almost never done, as it is a financial death sentence for most hospitals. Some states issue their own penalties — California, for instance, levies fines as high as $100,000 per incident on hospitals that are repeat offenders.

The government has also been giving money to some hospitals and quality groups to help improve patient safety efforts.

The HAC program has “put attention to the issue of complications and that attention wasn’t everywhere,” said Dr. John Bulger, Geisinger’s chief quality officer. However, he said hospitals such as his now must spend more time reviewing their Medicare billing records as the government uses those to evaluate patient safety. The penalty program, he said, “has the potential to take the time that could be spent on improvement and making sure the coding is accurate.”

Hospitals complain that the new penalties are arbitrary, since there may be almost no difference between hospitals that are penalized and those that narrowly escape falling into the worst quarter.

“Hospitals may be penalized on things they are getting safer on, and that sends a fairly mixed message,” said Nancy Foster, a quality expert at the American Hospital Association.

Hospital officials also point out those that do the best job identifying infections in patients may end up looking worse than others. “How hard you look for something influences your results,” said Dr. Darrell Campbell Jr., chief medical officer at the University of Michigan Health System. “We have a huge infection control group, one of the largest in the country. I tell them to go out and find it.” Campbell’s hospital had a high rate of urinary tract infections but was not penalized because it had fewer serious complications than most hospitals, records show.

The penalties come on top of other financial incentives Medicare has been placing on hospitals. This year, Medicare has already fined 2,610 hospitals for having too many patients return within a month of discharge. This is the third year those readmission penalties have been assessed. This is also the third year Medicare gave bonuses and penalties based on a variety of quality measures, including death rates and patient appraisals of their care. With the HAC penalties now in place, the worst-performing hospitals this year risk losing more than 5 percent of their regular Medicare reimbursements.

In determining the HAC penalties, Medicare judged hospitals on three measures: the frequency of central-line bloodstream infections caused by tubes used to pump fluids or medicine into veins, infections from tubes placed in bladders to remove urine, and rates of eight kinds of serious complications that occurred in hospitals, including collapsed lungs, surgical cuts, tears and reopened wounds and broken hips. Medicare tallied that and gave each hospital a score on a 10-point scale. Those in the top quarter — with a total score above 7 — were penalized.

About 1,400 hospitals are exempt from penalties because they provide specialized treatments such as psychiatry and rehabilitation or because they cater to a particular type of patient such as children and veterans. Small “critical access hospitals” that are mostly located in rural areas are also exempt, as are hospitals in Maryland, which have a special payment arrangement with the federal government.

The AHRQ study found that the biggest decreases in errors among those it studied occurred in the two categories of infections Medicare used in setting the penalties. Central-line associated bloodstream infections decreased by 49 percent and catheter-associated urinary tract infections dropped by 28 percent between 2010 and 2013. By contrast, pneumonia cases picked up by patients on ventilators that help them breathe – a condition not covered by the new penalties — decreased by only 3 percent during the same period.

Some of the errors on which the Medicare HAC penalties are based are rare compared to other mistakes the government tracks. For instance, AHRQ estimated that in 2013 there were 760,000 bad drug reactions to medicine that controls blood sugar in diabetics, but only 9,200 central-line infections. Infections from tubes inserted into urinary tracts are more common — AHRQ estimated there were 290,000 in 2013 — but those infections tend to be easier to treat and less likely to be lethal.

On the other measures, the study estimated there were 240,000 falls and more than 1 million bedsores.

In evaluating hospitals for the HAC penalties, the government adjusted infection rates by the type of hospital. When judging complications, it took into account the differing levels of sickness of each hospital’s patients, their ages and other factors that might make the patients more fragile. Still, academic medical centers have been complaining those adjustments are insufficient given the especially complicated cases they handle, such as organ transplants.

Medicare penalized 143 of 292 major teaching hospitals, the KHN analysis found. Penalized teaching hospitals included Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and Keck Medicine of USC in Los Angeles; Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta; Northwestern Memorial Hospital and University of Illinois Hospital in Chicago; George Washington University Hospital and Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C.

“We know some of the procedures we do — heart transplants or resecting cancerous portions of the esophagus — are going to be just more prone to having some of these adverse events,” said Dr. Atul Grover, the chief public policy officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges. “To lump in all of those things that are very complex procedures with simple things like pneumonia or hip replacements may not be giving an accurate result.”

Medicare levied penalties against a third or more of the hospitals it assessed in Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Utah, Washington and the District of Columbia, the KHN analysis found.

The penalties are reassessed each year and Medicare plans to add in more kinds of injuries. Starting next October, Medicare will assess rates of surgical site infections to its analysis. The following year, Medicare will examine the frequency of two antibiotic-resistant germs: Clostridium difficile, known as C. diff, and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, known as MRSA.

Jordan Rau is a reporter for Heartland Health Monitor, a news collaboration focusing on health issues and their impact in Missouri and Kansas.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — The trial for a 39-year-old Wichita man accused of trying to kill his family has been delayed until March at the request of the man’s attorney.

The Wichita Eagle reports Pettix McMillan is charged with three counts of attempted first-degree murder for the March 24 shootings of his 36-year-old wife and two sons, ages 5 and 13.

Prosecutors say the woman and older boy were shot in the torso in their west Wichita home, while the younger boy was shot in the head. All three survived.

McMillan’s trial had been scheduled to begin Monday in Sedgwick County District Court but now is set for March 30.

McMillan worked for a trucking company and has been found competent to stand trial. He remains in custody on $1 million bond.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — A suspected drunken driver plows into the living room of a west Wichita home and seriously injures the 93-year-old resident and a 69-year-old woman visiting her.

The Wichita Eagle  reports the crash happened at 9:55 p.m. Thursday. Police Lt. Joe Schroeder says both women suffered multiple injuries and remained at a hospital on Friday.

Schroeder says a 33-year-old man driving an Acura crashed through the wall as the women were seated in the living room of the home.

The man was booked into jail on suspicion of multiple counts, including driving under the influence and aggravated battery.

TOPEKA – T-Mobile customers in Kansas who were charged for third-party services on their mobile phone bills without their consent are eligible to receive refunds as part of a multi-state settlement reached earlier this week, Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt said in a media release.

The national settlement announced today was reached between T-Mobile, the attorneys general of Kansas and 49 other states and the District of Columbia, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission. It includes a total payment of $90 million to resolve allegations that T-Mobile placed charges on consumers’ mobile phone bills for third-party services that had not been authorized by the consumer, a practice known as “mobile cramming.” This settlement follows a similar one reached with AT&T Mobility in October.

Under the terms of the settlement, T-Mobile is required to provide at least $67.5 million in refunds to consumers who were victims of cramming.

“Consumers have a right to be clearly informed about the services they are purchasing – and the cost,” Schmidt said. “This settlement returns to consumers charges for programs they didn’t know they were signing up for and were often unable to cancel.”

For more information on how to obtain a refund, Kansas consumers should visit the attorney general’s consumer protection website at www.InYourCornerKansas.org or call (800) 432-2310.