KANSAS CITY, Kan. (AP) — A Kansas City, Kansas, clinic is offering a medication used to prevent infection in people at high risk of getting the AIDS virus.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration two years ago approved the HIV drug, Truvada, for HIV prevention.
The Kansas City Star reports that Sharon Lee, CEO of Family Health Care in Kansas City, Kansas, is holding a weekly clinic for people who want to take the drug. Lee says the clinic is among the first of its kind in the nation.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued guidelines recommending that doctors offer Truvada to people at substantial risk of HIV infection.
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A Kansas judge has recused himself from a capital murder case after the defendant filed a complaint accusing the judge of disregarding his rights.
Phillip Cheatham was convicted of capital murder in 2005 and sentenced to death for the slayings of Annette Roberson and Gloria Jones in December 2003. The Kansas Supreme Court last year overturned the capital murder conviction and death sentence because of ineffective counsel.
The Topeka Capital-Journal reports Shawnee County District Judge Mark Braun stepped down Friday at the start of what was expected to be a lengthy motions hearing. His decision means all of the motions upon which he already had ruled will have to be heard again by a different judge, and the scheduled Jan. 5 trial date will be pushed back.
ROLLA (AP) – A 6-year-old Fenton boy has drowned while swimming with family members at a rock quarry outside Rolla.
The Missouri State Highway patrol says Noah Cook was in a flotation device in the presence of family members Friday afternoon at Fugitive Beach, a private property at an abandoned rock quarry southeast of Rolla. The patrol says family members couldn’t find the child after several minutes.
A diver later found his body.
The child was pronounced dead by the Phelps County coroner.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — A report compiled when Kansas City was seeking federal terrorism and emergency response grants claims Kansas City International Airport is a hub for terrorist travel.
The Kansas City Star reports the Feb. 7 document prepared by Kansas City area emergency management officials seeking federal security grants was sent to the Department of Homeland Security to provide a threat picture for the Kansas City region. The report says KCI is a primary hub for known or suspected terrorist travel.
Kansas City Police Capt. Daniel Gates says he sent the report to the Federal Emergency Management Agency so FEMA could evaluate the region’s terrorism risk. Gates says the report shouldn’t create fear.
Mayer Nudell, a terrorism and security expert, says the report could have been amped up to win federal funds.
JUNCTION CITY- Junction City police reported Cody Allen Martin, 23, Junction City, died after being run over by a truck in the area of 24 Riley Manor.
Police Lt. Jeff Childs said, Just after 1:30 a.m. officers were dispatched to that area for a disturbance.
Law enforcement received a second call requesting that an ambulance be dispatched for a person that had been run over by a truck.
Upon their arrival authorities found Martin lying in the roadway. He was transported by ambulance to the emergency room at Geary Community Hospital where he received treatment for his injuries, but was later pronounced dead by hospital personnel.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — FedEx Corp., the latest shipper to be accused in a federal probe involving illegal online pharmacies, says it will fight the charges that it knowingly shipped drugs to people who lack valid prescriptions.
The company says it would have to invade the privacy of customers to stop such deliveries.
By contrast, UPS Inc. paid $40 million last year to resolve similar allegations and vowed to overhaul its procedures and work with investigators to detect suspicious activity.
The contrasting responses to the decade-long federal probe of the prescription drug black market underscore the difficulty shippers have in determining how far to go to uncover illicit online pharmacies among their customers and to alert the government.
Wall Street analysts, legal experts, anti-drug crusaders and the companies themselves are split on the issue.
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — One justice says the Kansas Supreme Court is making it so difficult for criminal defendants to get their trials moved that nothing short of an angry mob outside a courthouse will force a change.
Justice Lee Johnson leveled the criticism Friday in a separate opinion in the capital murder cases of Jonathan and Reginald Carr. The court overturned their death sentences for a crime spree that left four people dead in a Wichita field in December 2000.
But the court rejected the men’s claims that they should be tried again outside Wichita on all of the dozens of charges against them because of negative pretrial publicity.
Johnson wrote that under the decision, a change of venue won’t happen without a mob “storming the courthouse” with torches and a hangman’s rope.
ATCHISON- A Kansas woman died in an accident just before midnight in Doniphan County.
The Kansas Highway Patrol reported a 1990 Mazda convertible driven by Pamela S. Blair, 58, Atchison, was eastbound on 100th Road five miles northeast of Atchison.
For an unknown reason the vehicle left the roadway, entering the north ditch, struck an embankment and flipped, coming to rest on its top.
Blair was pronounced dead at the scene and transported to Becker-Dyer-Stanton Funeral Home. The KHP reported a passenger in the Mazda Phillip M. Theurer, 59, Atchison was also possibly injured but not if he was transported for treatment.
The KHP reported they were not wearing seat belts.
Thanks to a change in Missouri law, the Kansas City CARE Clinic, formerly the Kansas City Free Health Clinic, can now accept paying patients- photo by Todd Feeback
By Mike Sherry
KHI News Service
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A year and a half ago, a local safety net clinic underwent one of the most significant changes in its more than four decades of serving the metropolitan area: It went from a purely free provider to one that also accepted paying patients covered by insurance.
Known for years as the Kansas City Free Health Clinic, the organization became the Kansas City CARE Clinic to reflect that its donation-based operation had evolved to a fee-based, sliding-scale system with a minimum payment of $10.
The shift promised hundreds of thousands of dollars in new revenue for the clinic, at 3515 Broadway in Kansas City, Mo., but lawmakers first needed to fix a glitch in a state statute. That finally occurred last week when Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon signed legislation shepherded through the General Assembly by State Sen. Jolie Justus, a Kansas City Democrat.
“We are just thrilled that Jolie was able to get this through the Legislature and that the governor signed it, so we can move forward and make sure that we can continue to serve people in need in the Kansas City region,” said Kansas City CARE CEO Sheri Wood.
Roots in Westport
Established in 1971 as the Westport Free Health Clinic, KC CARE now handles about 19,000 patient visits per year. In addition to general medical services, such as physicals and well-women care, the clinic is one of the largest local providers of services to HIV patients.
The shift in operations at the clinic came in response to the 2010 enactment of the federal Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
Through federal subsidies, the act aims to help uninsured patients find affordable health coverage. The law also anticipated that more low-income residents would get medical coverage through Medicaid, though Missouri and Kansas are not among the states that have expanded Medicaid eligibility as the law envisioned.
KC CARE shed its status as a free clinic once some of its patients had a payment source. For example, Wood said, ACA-subsidized insurance policies helped roughly double — to about 60 percent — the number of the clinic’s HIV patients who have insurance. Wood also said the clinic’s transformation should pave the way for former patients to return to the clinic if they had previously been forced to go elsewhere once they became insured.
With about $9 million in annual revenue, excluding contributed goods and services, clinic officials estimate patient payments could conservatively boost annual revenue by about 6 percent. Wood said that philanthropy will remain an important component of the clinic’s budget.
Language barrier
But in making the change, the clinic ran afoul of Missouri’s $7.7 million State Legal Expense Fund, which helps cover legal judgments against all volunteer physicians at the clinic.
The section of the statute covering medical providers at nonprofit community health centers defined a free health clinic as one that provides services “without charge.”
The legislation removed the reference to a free health clinic – substituting “community health clinic” – and removed the “without charge” requirement. The bill excluded federally funded community health centers and rural health clinics from the organizations that are eligible to receive payment of a claim from the fund.
Wood expects to begin billing in September.
She said the additional revenue from insured patients will help the clinic cover increased operating costs, including the implementation of an electronic medical record system.
“But the bigger issue is capacity,” she said.
Clinics like KC CARE, Wood said, will play an important role in serving the anticipated surge of new patients coming into the system now that they are insured.
The clinic’s increased operating expenses include a second staff physician and a full-time nurse practitioner hired to handle increased demand for services.
Beyond Kansas City
The change in the state statute will have an effect beyond Kansas City, said Linda Judah, executive director of the Social Welfare Board in St. Joseph, Mo., and president of the Missouri Association of Free Clinics.
“The legislative fix is an exciting advancement for free and charitable clinics to continue to provide relevant safety net services in a fast-changing health care environment,” she wrote in an e-mail.
For her part, Justus was thrilled to help an organization that she has supported in the past as a volunteer. She is an attorney and serves as the director of pro bono services at the law firm of Shook, Hardy & Bacon.
So much of what happens in the General Assembly, Justus said, involves fixes that take a long time to bear fruit or are nearly invisible because they are buried in the bureaucracy. This legislative fix promises to have immediate benefits.
“That’s why I ran for office in the first place – to help solve these problem Kansas Citians run into – and we did it this year,” Justus said. “And when everything else seems to be going wrong in Jefferson City, and something like this goes right, it’s just a great feeling.”
Some believe “big data” may be the next renaissance in agriculture. Others call it the greatest advance in agriculture since the Green Revolution during the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s when one of the biggest waves of research and technology spurred the growth of agricultural production around the world. Some compare big data with the biotech revolution.
John Schlageck writes for the Kansas Farm Bureau.
High praise, but still so many questions remain about big data. Pressing questions facing farmers now are who owns this big data? Who controls it and how will it be used?
And if you don’t know what big data is join the crowd, there are countless people who don’t know or have multiple and diverse answers.
Not to alarm anyone, but less than a year ago, few people had heard this buzz word that means gathering and analyzing the vast amount of digital information produced by farmers.
Drones flying above farm land recording high resolution images, and field sensors providing immediate information concerning crop conditions including moisture, nutrients, pests, etc., may become commonplace during the big ag-data era.
No matter what beatitudes are bestowed on big data, most believe and hope it will improve farmers’ yields and productivity. Some say it will help feed the growing population expected to hit 9 billion in 2050. Agri-business companies are banking on its future.
Successful farmers and ranchers have always kept data. While it may have begun when the first cave man dug a hole in the soil and planted the first seed and progressed to a pocket-sized notebook and pencil, keeping and gathering information has always been beneficial to profitable agriculture.
About the mid-1990s, gathering data rocketed forward as computer technology fueled the concept of precision agriculture. This only intensified with the application and interest driven by the ever-growing data infrastructure. Greater affordability of this technology coupled with more computer processing power has also fanned the usage flames.
Prescriptive planting or relating soil, climate and seed data with a farmer’s productions records seems to be some of the potential of big data in agriculture. The potential for an increase in grain yields is another potential.
During the last couple years the Guettermans in Johnson County and Miami counties have used big data equipment provided by John Deere on their family farm. Nick Guetterman believes the more information he has at his disposal, the more likely he is to figure a better way to do things.
What he’s most interested in during this initial phase of using these new data collecting tools is to become even more efficient, farm as productively as possible and increase the return on his investment.
“Farmers collect data on almost every pass over the field — planting data, tillage data, spraying records and machine performance,” Nick says. “We’re trying to help use this data in real time – right now to make decisions that potentially make us better, more profitable farmers. Before we always looked at this data and analyzed it after the fact.”
But who gets that information — the farmer or the provider? Will they be prescribing what best suits their interests or those of the farmer?
Guetterman believes because he’s paid for the equipment, the data should belong to him and not be shared with anyone without his knowledge and permission. He’d also like to know where and what companies collecting big ag data are doing with this information.
The Johnson/Miami County farmer says he’s been told the data is not being used individually but in an aggregate format. Guetterman also believes companies selling ag- data services acknowledge farmers’ concerns in their policy and marketing statements, but their contracts don’t make that explicit,
“A farmer makes decisions based on his own experience and expertise, supplemented with his own data,” Guetterman says “That’s how I produce value as a manager.”
Some producers also worry the proliferation of ag data will erode the advantages producers have developed throughout several generations. Farmers like Guetterman also harbor real concerns about data privacy. That’s the world today’s farmers live in.
Stay tuned.
John Schlageck, a Hoxie native, is a leading commentator on agriculture and rural Kansas.
KANSAS CITY, Kan. (AP) — A Kansas City, Kansas, clinic is offering a medication used to prevent infection in people at high risk of getting the AIDS virus.
