Dr. Kenneth Baughman, a Brigham and Women's Hospital cardiologist from Newton, died at age 63 after being struck by a car while jogging Monday morning in Florida, where he had traveled to attend a medical conference. (Courtesy: Brigham and Women's Hospital)

By Matt Rocheleau, Globe Correspondent

A Brigham and Women's Hospital cardiologist was struck by a car while jogging and died yesterday morning in Orlando, where he was attending a medical conference, according to police.

Dr. Kenneth L. Baughman, 63, director of advanced heart disease at the Brigham, was in Orlando for the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2009. He was pronounced dead at the scene after being hit by a 2007 Saturn sedan while crossing the four-way intersection of Sand Lake Road, or State Road 482, and Universal Boulevard in Orlando at around 6 a.m. Monday, said Orlando Police Sgt. Bud Jones.

An investigation into the accident is ongoing, said Jones, but he does not believe charges will be filed against the 50-year-old driver, Gary Krotke, of Haines City, Fla.

Brigham and Women's Hospital has begun a clinical collaboration with Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island in Pawtucket.

Under an agreement announced last week, the affiliation will focus on cardiology and emergency medicine. Heart specialists from the Brigham will consult with Memorial Hospital physicians on patient care, including transfers to Boston, and assist in the development of a cardiac catheterization lab at Memorial.

Brigham doctors are also helping Memorial recruit a new chief of emergency medicine.

Memorial is a 294-bed teaching hospital affiliated with The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.

By Elizabeth Cooney, Globe Correspondent

A drug commonly prescribed to treat anemia in patients with both type 2 diabetes and kidney disease worked no better than placebo in reducing deaths or cardiovascular problems it was thought to prevent, according to a paper published online tonight. Instead, people who took the drug, Aranesp, were almost twice as likely to have strokes as patients given a dummy pill.

The study, led by Boston researchers, is the first trial to compare this class of anemia drugs to a placebo in the ability to prevent death and serious complications -- even though the drugs have been in use for decades.

"The risks of the therapy were bigger than we thought, namely stroke, and the benefits were less than we thought, in quality of life," said Dr. Marc Pfeffer, a cardiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital who led an international group studying Aranesp, which raises red blood cell levels.

Patients with type 2 diabetes and kidney disease often become anemic, and heart and kidney problems can be accelerated by anemia, so doctors have long prescribed Aranesp (darbepoetin alfa) and similar drugs believing that treating the anemia would improve patient's prognosis. The
study confirmed that patients taking Aranesp required fewer blood transfusions and suffered less fatigue, but other hoped-for outcomes were not seen.

Dr. Steven Woloshin of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice said the findings reinforce a crucial message in medicine. "This current study is an important reminder of how important it is not to assume the treatments work, but to prove them," said Woloshin, who was not involved in the study.

Elizabeth G. Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health, will become the next president of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Faulkner Hospital in Boston, the two medical centers are set to disclose this morning.

Nabel, 57, a cardiologist who graduated from Cornell University Medical College and trained at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, was appointed in a unanimous vote last night by the board of trustees that jointly oversees the two affiliated Boston teaching hospitals.

She will begin her new job on Jan. 1 when the hospitals' current president, Gary Gottlieb, becomes president and chief executive of Boston's Partners HealthCare, the parent organization of the Brigham and Women's, Faulkner, and Massachusetts General Hospital. Gottlieb replace James Mongan, who said in February that he would be retiring.

Nabel, a native of St. Paul, Minn., will be returning to Brigham and Women's, a teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School, where she completed her internship and residency in internal medicine and a clinical and research fellowship in cardiovascular medicine.

She later served on the faculty at the University of Michigan, where she become known for her research in vascular biology and molecular cardiology, before joining the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the NIH in 1999. In her current position, Nabel oversees a $3 billion budget.

By Liz Kowalczyk, Globe Staff

Many hospitals have been widely advertising robot-assisted surgery, especially for prostate cancer, marketing it as having shorter recovery times and fewer complications than standard operations.

But a nationwide study published today raises serious concerns about the wide use of robots in prostate operations, say Boston physicians who led the research team.

The Harvard Medical School researchers found that cancer patients who underwent minimally-invasive prostate removal -- now usually done with remote-controlled robots -- were more than twice as likely to experience incontinence or impotence a year and a half after their operations than patients who had traditional surgery using an open incision.

Success at controlling the cancer was about the same for both operations. Patients who had minimally invasive, or laparoscopic, surgery were able to go home from the hospital in two days on average, one day shorter than the comparision group, and had fewer post-surgery respiratory problems and other short-term complications.

Doctors in training are strictly bound by regulations governing how many hours they may work in a week and how much time off they must have between shifts, an outgrowth of research linking medical errors to a lack of sleep. Boston researchers have turned their attention to attending physicians, experienced doctors who perform emergency operations or deliver babies through the night and resume their workload the next day.

Dr. Jeffrey Rothschild of Brigham and Women's Hospital led an eight-year study comparing the rate of complications in procedures a physician performed the day after nighttime procedures to procedures the same physician performed after a night with no procedures.

The researchers found no statistically significant difference in the roughly 5 percent rate of complications, which included infection after surgery or blood loss after deliveries. But if the physician had less than a six-hour opportunity to sleep between the last nighttime procedure and the first one the next day, the complication rate was higher: 6.2 percent for less than six hours compared to 3.4 percent for more than six hours.

"These data suggest that attending physicians, like residents and nurses, may be at increased risk of making errors when sleep deprived or working extended shifts," the authors write in tomorrow's Journal of the American Medical Association.

In an interview, Rothschild said it would be premature to suggest policy changes before the issue is studied across all surgical specialties and in other hospitals. The study looked at a wide variety of specialties but it was conducted in a large, advanced-care, teaching hospital (not identified in the journal article) where resident physicians were available to assist attending physicians. But he said there are lessons that could be applied now.

"For physicians who find themselves in that situation, it's part of professionalism to ask for assistance or postpone a procedure if they feel they are fatigued," he said.

Massachusetts has made a strong showing in a $348 million federal grant program that encourages biomedical researchers to engage in high-risk projects with the potential to accelerate the translation of research discoveries into treatments.

Eleven of 42 Transformational R01 grants are flowing to scientists in the state and 12 of 55 New Innovator award winners are based here. One of 18 Pioneer Award recipients is from Massachusetts. All three programs from the National Institutes of Health are designed to spur exploration that may have been deemed too risky in past rounds.

A Brigham and Women's physician-researcher is being honored for her work advancing safety and quality for outpatients.

Dr. Tejal Gandhi has won a 2009 John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety and Quality Award in the research category from the National Quality Forum and The Joint Commission, national organizations that set quality standards in hospitals and other health care settings.

Executive director of quality and safety at Brigham and Women's and director of patient safety for Partners Healthcare, Gandhi also practices internal medicine. Her research has focused on using information technology to increase safety for outpatients, with an emphasis on preventing harm caused by medication errors. She led a large study on drug errors in chemotherapy given to outpatients and has analyzed the impact of computerized prescription orders on primary care.

As medical care has improved for people with health insurance, the consequences of being uninsured have worsened, according to a new study that says the lack of coverage translates into nearly 45,000 deaths each year among working-age Americans.

Researchers from Cambridge Health Alliance report in the American Journal of Public Health on a study that followed 9,005 adults under 65 years old who took part in a national survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 1986 through 1994. After 12 years, 351 people had died. Sixty of them were uninsured and 291 were insured.

After accounting for age, education, income, and other factors, the researchers found that people without private insurance had a 40 percent higher risk of dying than people with private insurance. An earlier study by the Institute of Medicine based on 16 years of data through 1993 found that uninsured people had a 25 percent higher risk of dying than insured people, which translated into 18,000 additional deaths.

"Being uninsured is more lethal relative to being insured than it was 20 years ago," co-author Dr. Steffie Woolhandler said in an interview.

The world's largest drug maker is faced with a record-breaking $2.3 billion fine for illegally promoting its drugs by wooing doctors with free golf, massages, and resort junkets, according to federal prosecutors, as reported in this story.

On A Healthy Blog, Georgia Maheras of the advocacy group Health Care For All has some ideas about how the state could spend its $14.7 million portion of the huge settlement from Pfizer Inc.

Her picks: Prescription Advantage, the state program to help elderly and disabled people pay for their medications, and Academic Detailing, a program that brings comparative effectiveness research on drugs and to health care providers, following a model developed by Dr. Jerry Avorn and Dr. Stephen Soumerai of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital intended to counteract drug company marketing.

"It would be poetic justice to devote the funds Massachusetts receives from this settlement to two critical budget line items that reduce the cost of prescription drugs for the state and low-income residents," Maheras writes.