Jindal
There's been a lot of turnover at LSU Health Care Services, the Louisiana public hospital system headquartered in Baton Rouge.
Not only has the system's top administrator resigned, but it turns out more than 40% of the state's 3,805 layoffs for the fiscal year that ended in June came from Louisiana State University-affiliated hospitals.
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Mount Sinai Hospital CEO Dr. Kenneth Davis reportedly sees no antitrust bumps on his organization's path to absorbing Continuum Health Partners into what would be New York City's largest healthcare provider.
The Mount Sinai and Continuum boards just this week signed a definitive agreement. Davis, as paraphrased in the New York Times, said a regional office of the Federal Trade Commission had already given them the all-clear.
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Should hospitals focus on the specific diseases that lead to the most readmissions, or should they look at internal issues that may be driving their overall readmission rates higher? It's a crucial question as hospital leaders search for ways to improve outcomes and avoid rising Medicare penalties for high readmission rates.
A new study suggests a disease-based focus on heart failure readmissions—one of the biggest drivers of high readmission rates—returns modest benefits at best.
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Average psychiatric inpatient hospital admissions rose more than 8% in 2011, according to an annual survey by the National Association of Psychiatric Health Systems, which said the need for inpatient behavioral health services continues to grow.
Released Monday, the survey collected 2011 data from 262 facilities, of which 84.5% were psychiatric hospitals and the remaining 15.5% were general hospitals with behavioral health services units.
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Healthcare industry groups are pressing regulators to issue the delayed final rule requiring manufacturers to mark medical devices with unique identifiers to improve patient safety and help healthcare providers during product recalls.
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HHS' inspector general has unveiled a large red button on the Internet that will cost hospitals and drug companies thousands or perhaps millions of dollars if they press it.
Yet, press it they might. The OIG unveiled a new online portal this week for healthcare companies to turn themselves in for violating some of the harshest and most sweeping federal laws on healthcare, including the anti-kickback statute, the False Claims Act, and the Stark law. More than $280 million has been sent to the government through the 800 self-disclosures since 1998, averaging $350,000 per filing.
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The healthcare industry, with the federal government at the helm, is setting sail on a voyage into the unknown: whether and to what extent patients are suffering harm from the systems that providers have spent many billions of dollars buying, and the feds many billions in incentivizing.
“That's the part we don't know,” said Dr. Ron Wyatt, medical director, division of healthcare improvement at the Joint Commission. “We know that probably less than 10% of adverse events are reported. That's how big the water is.”
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Watch out, community hospitals. The proposed merger between Tenet Healthcare Corp. and Vanguard Health Systems is expected to increase pressure on already-struggling stand-alone facilities in the markets where the two chains operate.
While the deals, Moody's Investors Service says the combination of two “large and powerful systems” will be a force to be reckoned with. In particular, Tenet will have more leverage to lure physicians away from smaller hospitals and will be able to take advantage of back-office economies of scale that will help reduce costs at a time of shrinking reimbursement and increased pressure on volumes.
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The sailing term is luffing. When a boat points too close to the wind, its sails flap with little power and its forward progress slows.
Incentive payments for physicians and other eligible professionals to implement electronic health records moved forward in May, according to the latest report from the CMS. But after four straight months of records for the number of payments made, the May figures are rather flappy.
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Job cuts in healthcare are hardly rare these days, but St. Vincent Health's newly announced layoffs in Indiana will certainly grab some eyeballs.
St. Vincent, a Roman Catholic provider and part of St. Louis-based Ascension Health Alliance, announced it would cut 865 jobs, according to the Indianapolis Business Journal.
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