Massachusetts is even better represented in the US News & World Report rankings released today than this item earlier this morning reported.

Boston Medical Center placed 20th in rheumatology, 25th in respiratory disorders, and 31st in geriatric care on the list. And the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge was ranked 15th in psychiatry. Hospitals were rated in 16 specialties.

The earlier item (now updated) was based on incomplete information furnished by the magazine before results were available online.

Boston Medical Center has named its first high-level safety and quality officer.

Dr. William M. Barron (left) has been named vice president for quality and patient safety/chief quality officer for the hospital. The new position consolidates in one senior management position the safety responsibilities previously handled by the chief medical officer.

Barron, who was also appointed director of the Center of Clinical Quality Improvement at Boston University School of Medicine, comes to Boston from Loyola University Health System, where he was vice president of quality and patient safety and a professor in the departments of medicine and obstetrics and gynecology at Loyola University.

Boston Medical Center has appointed a new trauma chief to succeed the late Dr. Erwin Hirsch, a leader who transformed the hospital and the field.

Dr. Peter A. Burke, chief of surgical critical care at the hospital and a professor of surgery at Boston University School of Medicine, will step into his new role on Tuesday. He came to the hospital in 1999 and worked with Hirsch in trauma care.

Hirsch, who had been trauma chief for 25 years, drowned last month in a boating accident in Rockport, Maine. He was 72.

Physicians and medical students are voicing their support for a state ban on gifts to doctors from drug and medical device makers.

Four leading physicians – Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine; Dr. David Coleman, Boston Medical Center chief of medicine; Dr. Jerome P. Kassirer, Tufts University School of Medicine professor; and Dr. Stephen E. Tosi, UMass Memorial Health Care chief medical officer – wrote a letter urging passage of a bill approved by the state Senate and awaiting action in the House.

“Many other professions adhere to strict ethics codes that bar receipt of gifts, while elected and government officials are guided by public finance laws prohibiting gifts from lobbyists,” the doctors wrote. “We do not believe physicians should be treated differently.”

The National Physicians Alliance and the Boston University and Tufts University chapters of the American Medical Students Association also sent a letter to Governor Deval Patrick, Senate President Therese Murray, and House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi pushing passage of the bill.

“To do right by our patients, our prescribing decisions must be based on independent, scientific evidence, free of inappropriate influences,” their letter said. “It is time to remove conflicts of interest from the doctor-patient relationship.”

Boston Medical Center's campaign to expand and update its buildings got an infusion of $15 million, the hospital announced today, a first step in an effort to raise at least $250 million to meet growing patient demand.

The gift from the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family Foundation will fund an expansion plan that includes a new nine-story ambulatory care center at the corner of East Concord and Albany streets in the South End. The new building, which will be named for the benefactors, is part of a preliminary master plan that will also increase inpatient capacity and build a larger emergency and trauma center, according to Norman Stein, the hospital's vice president for development.

"This is all being driven off the reality that some of our current facilities are outdated and we don't have the capacity to continue to grow into the future," he said.

The Boston Medical Center board has created the Exceptional Care Without Exception Trust to undertake a capital campaign to raise $250 million or more. Like the facilities master plan, the budget to raise money to pay for it is also still preliminary, Stein said in an interview.

By Kay Lazar, Globe Staff

Boston's three leading medical schools are among 14 nationwide that will receive federal grants aimed at helping scientists more quickly turn their discoveries into treatments for patients.

Under the program, Harvard Medical School has been awarded $117.7 million over the next five years, while Boston University Medical School will receive $23 million and Tufts University School of Medicine $20 million over that time period, the National Institutes of Health announced today.

The awards reflect a sea change in federal funding for scientific research. Schools that have traditionally competed within their own institutions for federal dollars must now form one collaborative center at each medical school to pull together all of its researchers and departments.

The mission of the grant program, called the Clinical and Translational Science Award, is to create a network of medical research institutions across the country that will translate new knowledge into tangible benefits for patients. Launched in 2006, the initiative has awarded money to 24 other medical schools. Total funding for the 14 new recipients will be $533 million over the next five years, the NIH said.

"Everybody knows there is a lot of great research going on but it doesn’t get to public practice," said Dr. Harry Selker, director of Tufts' new Clinical and Translational Science Institute. "This (grant program) is a big deal for the nation."

Boston Medical Center is building a new ambulatory care center that will consolidate outpatient services now at different sites.

The $189 million building will be located at the corner of East Concord and Albany streets in the South End. The 245,000-square-foot structure will house services now offered in the Doctors Office Building and at other outpatient locations. Construction will take about 30 months after demolition of a building at 91 East Concord St.

The project is being financed in part by $33 million in tax credits from the Massachusetts Health and Educational Facilities Authority. That will provide the medical center with $7.8 million in project equity, the hospital's chief financial officer Ronald Bartlett said in a statement.

Dr. David J. Shulkin works in two hospitals.

His day job is president and chief executive of Beth Israel Medical Center in New York. His night job is president and chief executive of the same institution, but once he began going on administrative rounds after midnight, he saw them as two different hospitals with one address, as different as night and day.

During the daytime, the hospital was fully staffed with administrators, department chairs and nurse managers, but senior managers were mostly absent at night, and staffing levels in general were lower.

The discrepancy is important, he writes in the New England Journal of Medicine, because research shows that outside the weekday, daylight hours from about 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., patients suffer more deaths, hospital readmissions, surgical errors, and medication mistakes.

“We should be establishing equal standards for staffing and service and striving for acceptable outcomes for every hour of the week,” he writes.

Just in time for Mother's Day, a Florida plastic surgeon is publishing the picture book "My Beautiful Mommy" to explain how Mom is going to look after a tummy tuck or a nose job.

Dr. Michael Salzhauer has come in for his share of flak, including a modest proposal for toddler cosmetic surgery by Boston Medical Center pediatrician Dr. Steven Parker on his blog Heathy Children.

Not everybody got the joke, but fellow commenters helpfully defined "satire."

The National Institutes of Health has created a "blue ribbon panel," including experts on infectious diseases, public health, biodefense and environmental justice, to advise the agency during ongoing reviews of public safety and environmental issues posed by a Boston University laboratory designed to study the world's deadliest germs.

In November, another panel of scientists, the National Research Council, concluded that the NIH had failed to adequately address the potential risks to the South End and Roxbury neighbors of the Biosafety Level-4 lab if germs escaped from the facility on the Boston Medical Center campus.

The panel will hold its first public meeting next Thursday, March 13, in Wilson Hall on the third floor of Building 1 of the NIH campus in Bethesda, MD. The meeting time has not yet been set.

By Stephen Smith, Globe staff

Even as he forges ahead with his battle to prevent CVS Corp. from opening in-store clinics, Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino today quietly convened a summit of high-powered medical players to examine what ails primary care in the city.

The meeting at the city's Parkman House included a who's who from Boston's healthcare landscape, including the presidents of three of the city's biggest hospitals: Elaine Ullian from Boston Medical Center, Dr. Gary Gottlieb from Brigham and Women's, and Ellen Zane from Tufts-New England Medical Center. Leaders of community health centers were there, too, along with the in-coming president of the Massachusetts Medical Society and the dean of Boston University's medical school, Dr. Karen Antman.

"We came together not just to talk about a problem that we all know has existed for some time," Menino said in a written statement after the meeting, "we came together in the spirit of creating a thoughtful and coordinated action plan to reduce barriers that limit access to important medical services."

By Alice Dembner, Globe Staff

The largest insurer of patients in the state's new subsidized coverage plan faces sanctions and a possible investigation by the attorney general for attempting to poach patients from other insurers.

Boston Medical Center sowed confusion when it sent a letter a month ago to 2,600 patients that wrongly implied they could only get care at BMC if they signed up for the hospital's insurance plan, called HealthNet. "To continue getting your care at Boston Medical Center, now is the time to switch..." the letter said.

The content of the letter and the direct approach to patients enrolled with other insurers violated HealthNet's state contract, according to the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector, which oversees the state plan.

Both Boston Medical Center and the state are now recontacting patients to ensure they have accurate information about access to care and their choice of health insurers, which also include Network Health, Neighborhood Health Plan and Fallon Community Health Plan.

By Andrew Ryan, Globe Staff

A University of Massachusetts Medical School professor who said he was conducting research on infectious disease during his arrest in a Worcester prostitution sting is studying gonorrhea in human subjects, a school spokesman said today.

However, the school was not aware that the study -- "Immunology of Infection with Neisseria gonorrhea" -- involved a trip to the corner of Main and Grand streets Saturday afternoon, where Dr. Peter A. Rice was arrested after allegedly offering to pay an undercover female officer $40 for sex.

"I don't think that his arrest had any connection to his work with the university," UMass spokesman Mark Shelton said this afternoon.

A Boston group is sharing genetic information from families affected by autism with other researchers to promote understanding of the developmental disorder.

The Autism Consortium, whose members include hospitals, medical schools and universities in the Boston area, will transfer profiles of 500,000 genetic variations found across the genomes of 700 families with two or more children who have autism. The data will be held by the Autism Genetic Resource Exchange, a program of the advocacy organization Autism Speaks. Scientists can apply to the exchange, which gathered DNA from the families. The samples have been scanned for sequences where there are deletions or extra copies of DNA segments. The consortium is sharing the genetic variations it found.

"We returned all of the raw data to AGRE so they can distribute it to any other investigtors who want to begin exploring what may be the genetic underpinnings of autism," Mark Daly, a consortium member from Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, said in an interview. "Understanding the genetics underlying a complex disease is not an easy problem to solve. So there's no excuse for hoarding your data when much more can be learned by sharing."

By Elizabeth Cooney, Globe Correspondent

Pediatric residents in Massachusetts and around the country gathered at noon today to push for expansion of a children's insurance plan that President Bush has threatened to veto.

At Boston Medical Center, about 50 residents, pediatricians, nurses and social workers paused in the hospital's main lobby as part of "Stand Up for SCHIP," the insurance program that covers children who don't qualify for Medicaid. There would have been one more, but that resident stayed behind in the intensive care unit with a child in respiratory distress, chief resident Marie Clark told the group. The child's father couldn't afford the asthma medication prescribed during an office visit on Friday, Dr. Suzanne Steinbach added, as an example of how lack of insurance hurts children.

"All of us here have had the same story," Dr. Barry Zuckerman, chief of pediatrics, said. "All of us are asking the president to do the right thing for children."

At noon today, pediatric residents across the country will join a 15-minute Stand up for SCHIP to urge President Bush not to veto an expansion of coverage for uninsured children who don't qualify for Medicaid.

The action started at Stanford's Lucile Packard Children's Hosptial in California but soon spread to dozens of hospitals, including Boston Medical Center, Children's Hospital Boston and UMass Memorial Medical Center in Massachusetts. The House and Senate have voted to reauthorize and expand the State Children's Health Insurance Plan, but the president has said he would veto it.

"It means children who could be covered won't be and the possibility that some children already covered may lose their insurance," Dr. Barry Zuckerman of Boston Medical Center said in an interview yesterday. "We see the consequences when patients don't get care when they don't have insurance."

Older adults have different concerns than younger people when they come to their doctors' offices, so a Boston coalition has created a free tool to help primary care physicians recognize and meet their needs.

The Boston Partnership for Older Adults, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has designed a two-page questionnaire to guide primary care physicians, who give most older people their care. The group is made up of 200 organizations and individuals concerned about the needs of older people in the city.

The focus is function, said Clare Wohlgemuth, nursing director of the Boston University Geriatric Services at Boston Medical Center and chair of the partnership's health committee.

By Liz Kowalczyk, Globe Staff

Boston University School of Medicine and Boston Medical Center today announced a strict new conflict-of-interest policy that will place hard limits on interactions between doctors and representatives from medical device makers and pharmaceutical companies.

Robert Restuccia, executive director of the Prescription Project, a Boston-based non-profit that promotes stricter conflict-of-interest policies nationally, said the university and hospital have adopted a model policy that goes further than many other institutions.

Boston Medical Center and the medical school, for example, now ban all clinicians from accepting personal gifts from industry, and meals funded by companies -- often a staple at teaching hospitals -- are no longer allowed on campus. Also, doctors who serve on committees that pick which drugs the hospital will use, are not allowed to have any financial relationship, including consulting agreements, with companies that might benefit from those decisions.

Boston-based Reach Out and Read, which promotes reading among low-income children, was awarded a literacy prize from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) -- one of only five awarded worldwide.

The group, which hands out free books to children when they visit the doctor, was founded in 1989 by Dr. Barry Zuckerman and Dr. Robert Needleman at what was then Boston City Hospital (now Boston Medical Center). The goal is to encourage parents to read to their children and prepare low-income children for school.

Surprise: On Running a Hospital, Paul Levy, president of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, says the Joint Commission, which accredits hospitals, showed up this morning for an unannounced visit. Until last year, these periodic reviews of safety and quality were scheduled in advance, but now hospitals get no warning. The accrediting body, which used to be called the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, will spend a week at the hospital.

"And, yes, we will publish our results once they go through the process of review at the Joint Commission headquarters," Levy writes.

Sugarcoating: On Healthy Children, Boston Medical Center pediatrician Dr. Steven Parker explores how doctors use euphemisms. Their intentions may be good, but they can end up creating confusion, he says.

"I know why this happens so often. Nice guys and compassionate to a fault, we pediatric providers hate to give bad news and avoid it when we can," he writes. "We think we are doing the family a favor: doesn't 'developmentally delayed' sound so much more hopeful, so much nicer, than 'mentally retarded?' "

HIPAA help: On WBUR's CommonHealth, Lori Abrams Berry of the Lynn Community Health Center worries that undocumented immigrants are being told that community health centers must report them to immigration officials if they seek health care.

"We need to find as many ways as we can to put the word out that community health centers are NOT obligated to report undocumented patients to immigration authorities," she writes. "On the contrary, HIPAA regulations actually prohibit us from giving information about our patients to anyone without their permission. (Who knew how handy this would turn out to be?)"

Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital held on to their honor roll positions in the annual rankings by U.S. News & World Report called "America's Best Hospitals." Nine Boston hospitals are featured in the guide.

Mass. General finished fifth in the standings, down one rung from last year, and the Brigham took tenth place, up one from last year. Once again, Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Mayo Clinic finished first and second. UCLA Medical Center moved up to third from fifth and the Cleveland Clinic slipped to fourth from third.

The magazine evaluated 5,462 hospitals in 16 specialties, excluding pediatrics, and came up with 173 hospitals that met standards in one or more specialties based on reputation, care-related factors such as nursing and patient services, and mortality rate. Eighteen hospitals scored at or near the top in at least six specialties to make the honor roll.

Other hospitals were ranked in the specialty areas, but not in a cumulative score. Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center was in the top 50 for 10 categories: diabetes (in conjunction with the Joslin Clinic); digestive disorders; respiratory care; heart and heart surgery; cancer care; kidney diseases; geriatrics; gynecology, urology; and ear, nose and throat care.

Boston-area hospitals known for their specialties also made the top 50. Dana-Farber Cancer Institute placed fifth in the list for cancer care. Joslin Clinic, with its partner Beth Israel Deaconess, was ranked 12th for endocrinology. New England Baptist Hospital was 17th for orthopedics and Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital ranked eighth for rehabilitation. Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary placed fourth in ophthalmology and in the ear, nose and throat specialty.

Boston Medical Center was ranked 41st in geriatrics.

Mass. General's winning specialty areas were cancer; digestive disorders; ear, nose and throat; endocrinology; geriatrics; heart and heart surgery; gynecology; kidney disease; neurology and neurosurgery; orthopedics; respiratory disorders; urology; psychiatry; and rheumatology.

The Brigham's top specialties were cancer; digestive disorders; ear, nose and throat; endocrinology; geriatrics; gynecology; heart and heart surgery; kidney disease; neurology and neurosurgery; orthopedics; respiratory disorders; urology; and rheumatology.

Cambridge Health Alliance will accept an award today from the National Association of Public Hospitals and Health Systems for its role in medical school curriculum change.

CHA developed a program for third-year Harvard Medical School students to follow patients for a year at one hospital instead of traditional rotations in different settings. The hospital was chosen for the 2007 Chair Award from 64 submissions, NAPH said in a statement.

Dr. Samantha L. Rosman, a third-year resident in pediatrics in Boston, has been re-elected to the American Medical Association's board of trustees. She is a 2004 graduate of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. After completing her residency, she will begin a fellowship in pediatric emergency medicine at Boston Medical Center.

Dr. Karen Shedlack (left), medical adviser for the mental retardation division of Vinfen, has won a 2007 Distinguished Fellowship from the American Psychiatric Association.

Before joining Vinfen, a private, nonprofit human services organization based in Cambridge, Shedlack was medical director for the adult developmental disabilities program at McLean Hospital and worked in the department of psychology and brain science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Virgin Life Care has named three Boston academics to its science advisory board.

A subsidiary of the Virgin group headed by Sir Richard Branson, the Boston company develops activity-based health rewards programs.

The board members are Dr. I-Min Lee of Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, Kyle McInnis of UMass-Boston and Jessica Whitely of UMass-Boston and Brown Medical School.

Children's Hospital Boston has honored five doctors with Community Physician Awards for the care they give in pediatric practices and community health centers.

They are Dr. Anthony Compagnone of Hyde Park Pediatrics, Dr. Debra Ann Gfeller of Holliston Pediatrics, Dr. David Holder of the Martha Eliot Health Center, Dr. Richard Marshall of Harvard Vanguard Associates at Copley and Dr. Robert Michaels of Longwood Pediatrics.

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

A plastic container in a laboratory at Boston Medical Center caught fire late this morning, resulting in smoke but no injuries or damage, according to a hospital spokeswoman.

The container, carrying a salt solution, was being used by researchers in an endocrinology lab on the second floor of the building at 670 Albany St., said Maria Pantages, a Boston Medical spokeswoman. The researchers said they believed they had put the container into a machine that would spin its contents, Pantages said. Instead, the device was both a spinner and a hot plate, and about 11:45 a.m., researchers smelled smoke.

The building was evacuated as a precaution and emergency units summoned. Within 45 minutes, she said, the building's occupants were allowed to return.

In March, smoldering medical waste caught fire in a sterilizing machine in a lab at the Boston University School of Medicine. The BU medical school and Boston Medical Center are affiliated institutions.

Children’s Hospital Boston has named James Cote (left) executive director of the Martha Eliot Health Center, a community health center in Jamaica Plain that is licensed and operated by Children’s.

Cote, who had been the health center's interim leader for the past year, has also worked at Children’s and Boston Medical Center. He holds an MBA with a specialty in health care administration and marketing from UMass-Boston and a bachelor's degree in biology from Saint Joseph’s College in North Windam, Maine.

By Chris Reidy, Globe Staff

Nurses at Boston Medical Center have scheduled a demonstration for today to protest "management's unfair labor practices," a nurses union said.

The Massachusetts Nurses Association of Canton said management actions "threaten BMC's ability to retain the staff needed to provide the care patients deserve."

Boston Medical Center said patient care and patient safety are its highest priority and added that management will "continue to work with nurses to provide benefits that are important."

"Boston Medical Center values our nurses and is committed to ensuring an exceptional workplace for its staff while providing high quality and safe care for our patients," the hospital said in a statement.

Proposals to build new devices to help premature infants, to inject medicine without breaking the skin and to guide surgeons operating on the brain were among projects to win $5 million in grants from the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology, the consortium announced today.

CIMIT, composed of Boston-area teaching hospitals and engineering schools, made 37 grants that range from $40,000 to $100,000. Twenty-two have military applications, acording to CIMIT, which receives support from the US Department of Defense as well as its members.

Dr. Riccardo Barbieri of Massachusetts General Hospital won a grant to develop a computational tool based on a premature infant's heartbeat to predict episodes when they stop breathing.

Mark Horenstein of Boston University will demonstate a way to inject medications through the skin using nanoparticles, leaving no wound behind.

Dr. Nobuyuki Nakajima of Brigham and Women's Hospital will work to improve how instruments can be navigated to diagnose and treat brain injury or disease.

"Our goal ... is to bring life-changing technology to patients as quickly as possible," Dr. John Parrish, CIMIT founder and director and Vietnam War battlefield surgeon, said in a statement. "We are especially aware of the needs of soldiers wounded on the battlefield."

On Nurse at small, Betsy Baumgartner, who works at a Boston teaching hospital, relates how patients react when she suggests they take Oxycodone (left) for pain.

"I'm still amazed at how many people are afraid to take this painkiller because of the media hype" about Oxycontin, she writes. "The funny part is that if you offer them Percocet they will gobble it right up without any questions!"

On Healthy Children, Dr. Stephen Parker of Boston Medical Center talks about methods for pain-free pediatrics - from skin-to-skin contact for newborns during procedures, to pet therapy for older hospitalized children, as well as anesthesia.

"Using some well-established (and some not-so-well-established) techniques to diminish the experience of pain, the screaming of kids in our emergency room and offices has markedly decreased," he writes.

If you could pick your parents, you'd be wise to choose ones who live long and have few risk factors for heart disease. But don't lose hope if your parents died young -- you still can lower those risks yourself, researchers from the Framingham Heart Study say.

Results published in tomorrow's Archives of Internal Medicine show that middle-aged children who had at least one parent who lived to age 85 were less likely to develop high blood pressure, high cholesterol and other risk factors for cardiovascular disease than people whose parents died younger.

Other research has connected longevity to heredity, but this multigenerational study showed that having fewer risk factors for cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in Americans, was an advantage that lasted. The Framingham Heart Study has followed generations of residents since 1948 to study cardiovascular and other chronic diseases. This latest analysis included 5,124 people who were examined every 4 to 8 years from 1971 to the present.

"If you weren't lucky enough to choose your parents, this study shows how some of destiny is determined by risk factors we already know about and know to be modifiable," study co-author Dr. Daniel Levy, director of the Framingham Heart Study and a member of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, said in an interview. "We know that if we eliminate high blood pressure, eliminate high cholesterol and then cigarette smoking, we would eradicate the overwhelming majority of cardiovascular disease in the United States."

Corie Lok connects the $100 million windfall for the Broad Institute's new psychiatric research center with other grants to the Harvard-MIT venture, suggesting they account for the dominance of the Broad in papers published in Nature journals. But the effect of philanthropy doesn't stop there.

"To me, this is more evidence that Boston research is greatly benefiting from philanthropic sources of funding," she writes. "I find it interesting that people who became millionaires through businesses that have nothing to do with science are quickly becoming the benefactors of science."

Paul Levy, president and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, repeats his call for hospitals to make public their rates of central line infections, which can occur after tubes are inserted into patients. An anonymous poster asked about another safety issue:

"What about the NY Times story just the other day on how rapidly the various hospitals react when someone enters the emergency room with what looks like a heart attack?" the writer says. "Boston Medical Center (is) way ahead of the BID (and all others in the Boston area). Are we working on this (and other things we are low on on the HHS measures)?"

John McDonough of Health Care For All reports on yesterday's Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector board meeting that celebrated meeting milestones, having enrolled more than 52,000 people and approving seven health plans to sell Commonwealth Choice coverage to people who don't qualify for subsidized plans.

"Working nurse" sounds a note of caution, however, saying 48,000 of those people were automatically given insurance paid for through the state budget, and the other 4,000 had state subsidies for their coverage.

"More folks having true affordable quality coverage is a very good thing," the post says. "It should be pointed out that in the big picture what’s been accomplished thus far has been the easy part."

On WBUR's CommonHealth, Jonathan Gruber, professor of economics at MIT and member of the Connector Board, asks whether health insurance can be compared with food.

"Most Americans think of health insurance as medical prepayment: you buy an up-front premium and in return all of your medical expenses are covered," he writes. "But such a system has an inherent flaw: any time something is free, it will be overused. This should not be a controversial statement to anyone who has ever gone to an all-you-can-eat buffet. Having paid at the door, you always end up eating more than if you were paying for each item your ordered."

Based on research of how insurance is used, he argues that individuals should pay for some of their health care costs, according to their income.

"Coming back to the buffet analogy, it is clearly harmful to not allow individuals to eat –- but less critical that you allow them to eat as much as they want."

Kevin, M.D. got this comment on Liz Kowalczyk's Globe story about Harvard sweetening rewards for doctors who teach:

"Great, so now my tuition goes up $10,000."

More Boston hospital workers may be getting flu shots this season than the national average, but beyond that it’s hard to figure out how they measure up.

Public health officials have been pushing for virtually all hospital workers to get flu shots because they can easily be exposed and infect vulnerable patients. But each of six hospitals that answered a White Coat Notes query today counts health care workers involved in direct patient care in its own way. And they don’t necessarily know who might have gotten a flu shot outside their hospitals' programs.

Here are the results:

Boston Medical Center: 71 percent
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute: 63 percent
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center: 60 percent
Massachusetts General Hospital: 59 percent
Brigham and Women’s Hospital: about 48 percent
Tufts-New England Medical Center: more than 50 percent, according to a preliminary count