A prominent figure in diabetes research is leaving the National Institutes of Health to lead patient care and research at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and its hospital partner.

Dr. David Harlan, who heads the diabetes branch at the National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive, and Kidney Diseases in Bethesda, Md., will become division chief of diabetes at the medical school and director of the diabetes center at UMass Memorial Medical Center, both in Worcester. He will also be associate director of the school's diabetes and endocrinology research center. The appointments are effective next month. He succeeds Dr. Aldo Rossini, who retired last year.

At UMass, Harlan, 53, hopes to refashion the way care is delivered to people who have diabetes.

"It's an easy diagnosis to make, but the management of [diabetes] is very difficult." he said in an interview. "Many patients, I think, feel more or less on their own, and that the system doesn't work very well for them. So one motivation to come to UMass is the opportunity to look top to bottom at how diabetes care delivery is done and to try to come up with better ways to help patients with this disease. NIH is a fabulous place, but it doesn't have a real hospital -- all patients seen here have to be enrolled in some kind of research protocol."

Two Worcester hospitals located less than three miles apart charge markedly different amounts for the same services, a story in the Sunday Telegram reports, reflecting a split between academic and community hospital prices and the different rates the state's largest insurer pays.

An analysis that compared hospital charges for treating ailments from heart failure to pneumonia at the UMass Memorial Medical Center -- University Campus and St. Vincent Hospital found gaps of 50 percent or more between the two hospitals. UMass Memorial has other hospitals throughout Central Massachusetts, but its 300-bed flagship was used in the comparison with similarly sized St. Vincent. Quality was comparable, according to state and federal data.

The different rates paid by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts show a pattern like the one revealed in a Boston Globe Spotlight series on the relationship between Blue Cross and Partners HealthCare, parent company of Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

Dr. Walter H. Ettinger Jr., president of UMass Memorial Medical Center, said educating University of Massachusetts Medical School students and delivering specialized care, such as treatment provided in the hospital's Level 1 trauma center or its neonatal intensive care unit, account for the higher prices for all patients.

"Those costs are all included in the rates that we get,” Ettinger told the Telegram. "Teaching doctors is expensive. Some of these specialties lose money. One thing that the country and the commonwealth are going to have to deal with is, these are real costs."

The architect of a turnaround at UMass Memorial Medical Center's cardiac surgery program has left to join a hospital system in South Florida.

Dr. Lynn Harrison, 65, is the new clinical director of cardiac surgery at Baptist Health in Miami, the six-hospital healthcare system said this week. Harrison has been at the hospital since the spring, but an expanded cardiac and thoracic surgery group was announced Tuesday.

Harrison had been chief of cardiac surgery at UMass Memorial since 2006. Before that he was chair of surgery at Louisiana State University in New Orleans until Hurricane Katrina closed hospitals where LSU surgeons operated.

He was brought in to UMass Memorial to lead a cardiac surgery program that was shut down for two months in 2005 after its death rates were significantly higher than the state average. The Worcester hospital's cardiac surgery program is now rated among the safest in the country, based on national quality measures.

Harrison's successor at UMass Memorial is Dr. Stanley Tam, who came to UMass Memorial from Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge.

Harrison said in an interview that he considered his job at UMass Memorial done, having helped get the cardiac surgery program back on its feet. He was recruited by Baptist, he said.

"I think it's good when you pass the baton to get out of the way and let whoever you pass it to to lead," he said.

Patient satisfaction and aggressive care don't necessarily go hand in hand, according to new hospital ratings prepared by Consumer Reports.

Drawing on government surveys compiled on the Hospital Compare web site and the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care intensity index, the consumer ratings publisher has ranked the nation's more than 3,000 hospitals on its online health site, using the same red and black blobs familiar from ratings of cars or digital cameras.

Patient satisfaction covered eight categories, from cleanliness to communication, and intensity was measured by the number of tests conducted, doctors' visits made, procedures performed, and days spent in the hospital. Consumer Reports reverses how Dartmouth reports intensity, instead presenting aggressive care at the low end and conservative care at the high end of a spectrum from 1 to 100.

The top 28 teaching hospitals -- those that ranked significantly above the national average in patient satisfaction -- on average practiced more conservative medicine than 59 percent of hospitals, according to Dartmouth benchmarks for chronic care.

Brigham and Women's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, the only two hospitals in the state to make the highest performers' list, were among the exceptions. The Brigham's Dartmouth score says it is more conservative than 29 percent of hospitals and Mass. General is more conservative than 18 percent on a spectrum where aggressive scores are low and conservative scores are high.

That stands in contrast to the Dartmouth-affiliated Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital in Lebanon, NH. Its overall patient satisfaction score of 81 is one point ahead of the Brigham and one point below Mass. General, but its Dartmouth score says its care is more conservative than 88 percent of hospitals.

"Mass. General does very well and so does the Brigham among better-performing hospitals. They are more toward the aggressive end of the spectrum, but what we try to communicate to folks is a more conservative approach doesn't lessen patient satisfaction," Dr. John Santa, director of the Consumer Reports Health Ratings Center, said in an interview. "It actually appears to be associated with a better experience."

The dominant healthcare system in Central Massachusetts posted a surplus for its most recent fiscal year while two other hospitals in the region reached an agreement under which the larger hospital will oversee the smaller one, according to the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.

UMass Memorial Health Care Inc., which controls about two-thirds of the healthcare market in Worcester County, reported a surplus of $55.5 million in its 2008 fiscal year, the T&G story says. It posted a surplus of $93.2 million in 2007, buoyed by investments.

In Southern Worcester County, Harrington Memorial Hospital in Southbridge will supervise day-to-day operations of Hubbard Regional Hospital in Webster under an agreement that takes effect Jan. 1, the T&G reports. Hubbard has 22 beds and Harrington has 113. The move is seen as a first step toward a two-campus healthcare system. The hospitals are separated by 12 miles.

Patients breathe easier when Cindy French is caring for them.

A nurse practitioner long drawn to the care of people with severe lung and neuromuscular disease, French was honored last night by the Kenneth B. Schwartz Center with its Compassionate Caregiver Award. More than 100 people were nominated for the award, which honors a Boston lawyer who wrote poignantly in a 1995 Globe magazine article about the difference compassion made to him as he was fighting lung cancer.

French coordinates critical care operation at UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, sees patients in its Lung and Allergy Center, and is the assistant editor of the journal Chest. Working with Dr. Richard Irwin, she created a pulmonary rehabilitation program and fought to have its services covered by insurance. She also established a multidisciplinary ALS center to make it easier for patients to manage different appointments in one location.

“She’s amazing. There is nothing she wouldn’t do to make sure that our patients are taken care of in the best way,” Irwin said. “Cindy treats all of her patients just like they were her own family.”

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

Two disaster response teams from Massachusetts are bound for Louisiana tonight as Hurricane Gustav churns toward the Gulf Coast, a trip that is returning the doctors, nurses, and other medical workers to familiar terrain.

The medical squads -- one consisting of Boston-area health workers, the other representing central and western Massachusetts -- were dispatched to the same region three years ago, when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita pummeled New Orleans and a broad swath of the Gulf Coast.

Shortly past 5 p.m., registered nurse Gina Smith led nearly three dozen other health workers as they clambered aboard a bus destined for Hanscom Air Force Base. They were scheduled to fly from there to Baton Rouge, La., where they will be stationed as the storm swirls northward.

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.”

University of Massachusetts Medical School and its high-powered RNAi research team have lured a top Boston physician-scientist to head its academic and clinical neurology departments, the school announced today.

Dr. Robert H. Brown Jr. (left), who identified gene mutations linked to the neuromuscular disease ALS, is leaving Massachusetts General Hospital after 30 years to take on his new roles in Worcester. He has already been working with UMass scientists to develop therapies for neurodegenerative diseases based on RNA interference, a gene-silencing mechanism discovered by UMass researcher and Nobel laureate Craig C. Mello.

Brown called Mello remarkable for his commitment to using basic science in the form of RNAi research to ameliorate human suffering.

"We do basic lab work on the genetics of these diseases," Brown said in an interview. "The question is, after 30 years and five or six genes, can we now find new ways to treat the problems they present?"

Brown, a physician and a scientist, founded the Day Neuromuscular Laboratory and also directs the Muscular Dystrophy Association Clinic at Mass. General and is a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. He will chair neurology at UMass Medical School and its clinical partner, UMass Memorial Medical Center, when he arrives in October.

He holds degrees from from Amherst College, Harvard Medical School, and Oxford University, where he received a doctorate in neurophysiology.

The director of the Harvard University Health Services clinic at the Business School, Dr. Bruce Biller, was reprimanded today by the state medical licensing board and ordered to complete sexual harassment training.

The medical board also indefinitely suspended the medical license of Dr. Perveen Rathore, a psychiatrist who was involved in a physical altercation with police and staff at UMass Memorial Medical Center last May.

According to a consent order between Biller and the Board of Registration in Medicine, Biller made a female employee uncomfortable when he touched her as a gesture of appreciation for fixing his cellphone in March 2005. The employee filed a sexual harassment complaint against Biller, and during an investigation by Harvard, a nurse reported that Biller had kissed her forehead in November 2004 to wish her a happy Thanksgiving, the board's order said.

Harvard concluded that Biller engaged in behavior inconsistent with the university's standards of conduct and issued a performance warning to Biller, according to the board's order.