Alaska news and information

The Federal Trade Commission has compelled Fresenius Medical Care to sell 60 outpatient dialysis clinics in 43 markets as a condition of buying Liberty Dialysis Holdings for $2.1 billion.
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Some 110 physician groups signed a recent letter to House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) urging Congress to use leftover military contingency funds for a "cleaning of the books" that...
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The new Eagle Butte Health Center in South Dakota is set to open for business this week. The 10-bed, 138,000-square-foot Indian Health Service facility was paid for with $84.5 million from the stimulus law.
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In the past decade, states with the highest per-capita healthcare spending tended to have older populations and higher per-capita incomes, while states that spent less on healthcare had younger populations, lower per-capita incomes and a higher rate of uninsured, according to a CMS paper published...
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Three healthcare organizations are among the four winners of the 2011 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Awards, announced Nov. 22. The awards recognize top-performing organizations for excellence in innovation, efficiency and quality improvement. This year's winners were chosen from a field of 69...
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Providence Health & Services and Swedish Health Services say their local solution to the national problem of improving care while lowering costs is to combine their western Washington operations in a new not-for-profit system.
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In South Anchorage, Alaska, a new kind of medical center is trying to make it financially based on payments from Medicare.
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Ruling that hospitals' interstate-commerce rights may trump state certificate-of-need laws, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle decided that the state of Washington didn't have clear congressional authority to prevent a hospital from performing lucrative elective procedures like stent...
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All but one state in a recent survey of 13 states plan to hand out payments under the federally backed Medicaid electronic health-record incentive payment program without checking first whether providers have met all eligibility requirements,
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The board of Care New England Health System, Providence, R.I., chose Dennis Keefe to succeed John Hynes as president and CEO. Keefe is set to assume leadership of the three-hospital system Aug. 1. Hynes, 65, who has been Care New England's top executive since its formation in 1996,...
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