A new building that will house mentally ill veterans during their treatment at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Salem is nearing completion.

Construction of the $9.5 million, 38-bed facility comes as more veterans return from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with mental health needs.

Last year, the Salem VA received $1.7 million to hire an extra 13 mental health staffers as part of a national effort by the Department of Veterans Affairs to improve its psychiatric treatment program.

A spokeswoman for the Salem hospital said plans for the new building predate that initiative.

Nonetheless, “this will be a significant improvement over our current facilities for acute psychiatry treatment,” Marian McConnell said.

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A health care administrator with ties to Western Virginia has been confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the new head of the federal agency that administers Medicare and Medicaid.

Marilyn Tavenner, who grew up in Henry County, will take over the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) at a time of major change in the health care field.

She will be responsible for overseeing new policies under the Affordable Care Act, the new health care law that calls for more affordable insurance to be sold through exchanges and the expansion of Medicaid for the poor, among other things.

A Fieldale native, Tavenner graduated from a nursing school at Roanoke Memorial Hospital, now owned by Carilion Clinic. She worked for more than 25 years for HCA, a national hospital chain and parent company of LewisGale Regional Health System.

After starting as a nurse at Johnston-Willis Hospital in Richmond, Tavenner eventually became its chief executive officer. In 2005, incoming Gov. Tim Kaine selected her to run Virginia’s health department. After that, she served as deputy administrator and acting administrator of CMS.

“Marilyn brings with her a breadth of experience and expertise from virtually all angles of health care policy and delivery,” Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement this week.

Virginia Tech has released its latest rating of football helmets, based on scientific evaluations of how they absorb hits taken on the gridiron.

The results are the latest in a project, started in 2011, that uses sensors placed in the helmets to measure the magnitude of an impact to the head, and how well the helmet reduces the risk of a concussion.

“Our research focuses on identifying helmets that reduce concussion risk so that athletes can make informed decisions based on independent data when purchasing equipment, which in turn incentivizes helmet manufacturers to design helmets that better reduce head acceleration,” said Tech engineering professor Stefan Duma.

Duma is the director of the project, undertaken by the Tech-Wake Forest School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences.

This year, 18 helmets were evaluated through an analysis of more than 2,000 laboratory tests. The tests were based on more than 2 million head impacts recorded in high school and college football games.

To see how the helmets rated, click here.

To read some of our previous coverage of the  project, click here and here.

A Roanoke council of the Knights of Columbus has made it possible for a women’s medical clinic to get a new ultrasound machine.

Checks totaling about $27,000 were presented Saturday to the Blue Ridge Women’s Center.

Half of the amount came from a number of fundraising activities by the Roanoke Council 562 of the Catholic fraternal service organization. The other half came from the Supreme Council of the Knights of Columbus as part of a national program that has donated 350 ultrasound machines to pregnancy centers in 45 states.

The new ultrasound machine will replace an older one used by the Blue Ridge Women’s Center. As a Christian-based medical clinic, the center deals with unplanned pregnancies, relationships and reproductive health. It also offers counseling to women who have had abortions.

Since the center opened in 1984, it has provided free services to more than 15,000 women.

“We could give no better gift this Mother’s Day weekend than to donate to the Blue Ridge Women’s Center the ability to provide mothers with the very best diagnostic ultrasound technology available,” Karl Kleinhenz, grand knight of the Roanoke Council 562, said in announcement released Saturday.

A Blacksburg biotech firm has won a $1.9 million contract to help fight bacteria that is resistant to multiple drugs and is infecting a growing number of hospital patients.

Techulon Inc. received the award from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, an arm of the U.S. Department of Defense, the company announced this week.

The funding will allow Techulon to continue its work toward developing a drug to combat multi-drug-resistant bacteria.

Known as “superbugs,” the bacteria are showing up in patients at hospitals and nursing homes, causing 100,000 deaths a year and more than $30 billion in medical costs, the company said.

“It is a problem that’s creeping more and more into hospital emergency rooms across the country,” said Josh Bryson, chief scientific officer at Techulon.

Over the next two years, scientists at Techulon will work to develop a drug they hope to eventually use in human clinical trials.

Although the goal is to put the technology to use at veterans’ hospitals, Bryson said it will also benefit civilian patients.

Charges for the same medical procedures can vary by  thousands of dollars at hospitals across the country — and at the two  cross-town rivals in the Roanoke Valley, according to data released  Wednesday by the federal government.

At LewisGale Medical Center in Salem, the list price  for nearly all of the treatments included in the data was higher than  what was charged by Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital.

For example, the average cost for a joint replacement at LewisGale was $64,505, compared with  $53,441 at Roanoke Memorial.

In fact, Roanoke Memorial was less expensive for all but two of 95 procedures included in the data.

Released by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and  Medicaid Services, the figures were touted as the first opportunity for  health care consumers to make a hospital-to-hospital comparison.

To read the rest of this story, click here.

To go directly to the data on prices, click here. A note: This is raw data, and lots of it — a listing of hundreds of hospitals, arranged in alphabetical order by state. To search for a particular hospital, enter its name in the search box in the upper right corner, where the words “find in this dataset” appear.  That will take you to a list of up to 100 procedures performed at the hospital, which appear in the column labeled “DRG definition.”  Scroll to the right to find the list price for the services, which is labeled “ average covered charge.” The next column to the right, labeled “average total payment” is what Medicare actually paid to the hospital.

As the Roanoke and New River valley populations grow older, the time is coming for the region’s first hospice center.

A nonprofit community group in Blacksburg soon will launch a fundraising drive to build a residential hospice facility to be called the Sojourn Center .

Plans are still taking shape, but the general concept is for a state-licensed facility where seven to 10 patients would receive end-of-life care for their terminal illnesses.

While professional hospice care often is provided in private homes, there are only three licensed residential hospices in Virginia, according to the state health department. They are in Charlottesville, Winchester and Virginia Beach.

Many people might prefer to spend their final days at home, but that is not always possible.

The hospice would be available to patients with failing health who live alone, those who have an elderly spouse who is overwhelmed by the burden of caregiving, or those in younger households where dying members and child-rearing make for a difficult combination.

In those and other situations, a residential hospice center would provide a level of care not found in nursing homes or hospitals, organizers say.

Read the rest of the story here.

Charlotte Tyson

A health care manager who once served as a nurse has been appointed chief nurse executive at LewisGale Regional Health System.

The newly-created position will be filled by Charlotte Tyson, LewisGale announced today.

Tyson most recently served as chief operating officer for LewisGale Medical Center in Salem.

The regional health system, which includes four hospitals and more than 40 patient care facilities in Southwest Virginia, recently decided to create an executive-level position to oversee nursing services.

“Nurses are the backbone of our heath system and often the first encounter our patients have with LewisGale,” Victor Giovanetti, president of the health system, said in a prepared statement.

As LewisGale evolved into a regional health system, officials saw the need for market-wide leadership in the nursing field, he said.

Tyson will be responsible for all nursing services at LewisGale’s flagship hospital in Salem. She will also work with the chief nursing officers at the system’s other three hospitals in Alleghany, Montgomery and Pulaski counties.

Tyson joined LewisGale in 1984 as a staff nurse. Since then, she has served as director of oncology and medical surgical services, director of quality and risk management, and chief nursing officer.

Less than three years after its inception, the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute is feeling cuts to its federal funding.

About $640,000 in grant money to the Roanoke-based institute has already been lost to sequestration, the automatic, across-the-board cuts in federal spending that resulted from an effort by Congress to reduce the budget deficit.

Another $1 million could be slashed by the end of the year, said Michael Friedlander, executive director of the institute.

No jobs have been lost, nor have any research projects been shelved.

Just the same, Friedlander said, the cuts are having a direct impact on biomedical research aimed at helping people suffering from depression, substance abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder, brain injuries and other ailments.

To read the rest of this story, click here.

A former Pulaski County doctor who served as the director of a medical spa has been cited by state regulators for improperly dispensing a weight-loss drug.

Dr. Ralph Hasspieler will pay a $1,500 fine, according to an agreement recently reached with the Virginia Board of Medicine.

An April 10 order from the board states that from November 2008 to June 2009, Hasspieler dispensed phentermine, a diet drug, to five patients at a medical spa without being licensed to do so by the state Board of Pharmacy.

The order does not identify the medical spa by name or location.

Dr. William Harp, executive director of the Board of Medicine, declined to elaborate on the disciplinary action, saying in an email that “the order speaks for itself.”

In addition to not naming the medical spa, the order does not say if the five unidentified patients who received the drug were harmed.

Phentermine, a controlled substance, has been prescribed as an appetite suppressant at medical spas, which often offer nonsurgical cosmetic procedures to reduce weight and erase wrinkles alongside traditional salon offerings such as manicures, hairstyling and massage.

To read the rest of this story, click here.