Daily check up: More Boston children are hungry and too thin, doctors say

By Chelsea Conaboy, Globe Staff

A look at the morning’s top health industry news.

Hunger in the city: Doctors at Boston Medical Center say they are seeing more hungry and dangerously thin young children than at any point in more than a decade, Globe reporter Kay Lazar writes. More families are reporting that they don’t have enough food each month, more infants are being referred to the hospital’s Grow Clinic, and emergency department physicians are finding that more of the children who come in for services weigh less than they should.

The more you scan, the more you make: At the heart of the discussion over changing the way hospitals and doctors are paid is the understanding that investments we, as a society, make in health care should be determined by what is needed to keep patients healthy, not by what will make the most money for health care providers, insurers, or others. This blog post from Brian Rosman, research director at Health Care For All, shows one example of why that conversation is necessary: a pamphlet urging doctors to invest in a Siemens CT scanner to improve their bottom line. The more tests they perform, the more money they make.

Hospital mergers: I was talking with a spokesman for Steward Health Care System recently and had to ask him, “Exactly how many hospitals do you own these days?” Health care consolidation, particularly by Steward, is happening so fast in Massachusetts that it’s hard to keep up with. Fran Cronin of the CommonHealth blog created this handy timeline.

Stem cell challenge dismissed: Carolyn Y. Johnson has more on the decision yesterday by a district court judge in Washington to dismiss a lawsuit challenging money for stem cell research. The move ended months of uncertainty for Boston scientists.