Five clinical service chiefs at Royal Oak, Mich.-based Beaumont Health System delivered a letter to the Beaumont board of directors asking the board to reconsider its proposed merger with Henry Ford Health System, sources told Crain's Detroit Business. Three board members voted to block a vote to reconsider the merger, sources said. The board then tabled a discussion on the issue for at least three weeks to conduct more due diligence on the extent of opposition from the Beaumont physicians, the sources said.
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LUDINGTON, Mich.—Memorial Medical Center in Ludington is the latest hospital with plans to become a member of Spectrum Health. Memorial Medical, an 80-bed hospital near the shore of Lake Michigan, signed a nonbinding letter of intent to join the not-for-profit system, based about 90 miles south in Grand Rapids. The decision comes after a vote last fall in which Memorial Medical Center's board of directors decided to investigate possible relationships with larger and more integrated healthcare systems. Memorial Medical Center looked at 27 options before narrowing the field to...
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LIVONIA, Mich.—Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Michigan and Trinity Health-Michigan have signed a three-year reimbursement contract that gives Trinity's 12 hospitals in Michigan financial incentives for improving care with affiliated physicians. Blue Cross has similar contracts with Warren-based St. John Providence Health System and Royal Oak-based Beaumont Health System in Southeast Michigan, but the Trinity contract is the first one that applies statewide. “The current fee-for-service approach to paying hospitals is failing to improve care and lower its cost,”...
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COLUMBIA, Mo.—The University of Missouri Health System recently opened a $190 million expansion to University Hospital. The 310,500-square-foot addition includes a 100,000-square-foot replacement for its Ellis Fischel Cancer Center on two of the towers' eight floors. The building has 90 private patient rooms, six operating rooms, 25 pre-procedure rooms and 18 post-procedure rooms. The building also houses a 7,000-square-foot pharmacy. Plans call for six additional operating rooms for the future. Officials have applied for LEED Silver certification for the hospital, which includes...
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MINNEAPOLIS—Sanford Health, a South Dakota health system on an acquisition streak, called off merger talks with Minneapolis-based Fairview Health Services after the deal met resistance from Minnesota officials. Sanford CEO Kelby Krabbenhoft said in a statement that the health system appears to be “unwelcome by some interested parties and key stakeholders of our proposed merger partner,” and without their support a merger proposal would be “inconceivable and unacceptable.” Krabbenhoft specifically said no deal would proceed without a “positive...
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Two months after vetoing the bills because of abortion restrictions, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder signed two bills to allow Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Michigan to convert into a not-for-profit mutual health insurance company, pay an estimated $100 million in annual state and local taxes and, ultimately, create a $1.56 billion community foundation.
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ST. LOUIS—A 2012 Missouri law that allows employers and insurers to deny contraceptive coverage is pre-empted by the healthcare reform law and accompanying regulations, a U.S. District Court judge ruled. Under the Missouri law, insurers and employers or other healthcare plan sponsors cannot be compelled to provide coverage for contraceptives, abortion or sterilization “if such items or procedures are contrary” to their religious beliefs or moral convictions. Two insurers—Health Alliance Life Insurance and HMO Missouri—challenged the law after they received...
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JOPLIN, Mo.—McCarthy Building Cos. has topped out the new Mercy Hospital Joplin, the 875,000-square-foot, seven-story structure built to replace St. John's Regional Medical Center. The former hospital was destroyed in May 2011 when the deadliest tornado to hit the U.S. since 1947 struck the hospital directly. McCarthy began construction on the budgeted $335 million hospital in January 2012. Its exterior is expected to be completed in November 2013, its utility plant operational by January 2014, and the main unit open in March 2015. The new hospital will also be larger than its...
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ISHPEMING, Mich.—LifePoint Hospitals, Brentwood, Tenn., forged its second deal in Michigan in less than a week as the company seeks to build a presence in the state's Upper Peninsula. The publicly traded system made its first purchase in Michigan last year when it acquired Marquette (Mich.) General Hospital in a $483 million deal through its Duke LifePoint Healthcare joint venture with Duke University Health System, Durham, N.C. On March 5, 25-bed Bell Hospital, located about 15 miles away from Marquette General in Ishpeming, signed a letter of intent to be acquired by LifePoint.
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The experiences of Milwaukee's Froedtert Health system during the past several weeks represent something of a microcosm of what the nation's healthcare system as a whole is going through.The system discovered a virus in its computers, it opened a new $25 million outpatient facility and, most recently, it created a new clinical group practice by formally consolidating with a group it had a long-standing collaboration with—faculty physicians from the Medical College of Wisconsin.
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CLEVELAND—The Cleveland Clinic has agreed to share electronic records through the state of Ohio's CliniSync electronic medical-record exchange system, said Dan Paoletti, CEO of the Ohio Health Information Partnership, which runs CliniSync. University Hospitals announced a similar agreement. The MetroHealth System has yet to sign on but is discussing the idea with the partnership, Paoletti said. Getting the two biggest hospitals systems in Northeast Ohio to join CliniSync should make it much easier to get other Ohio hospitals to follow suit, he said. “It's one of those...
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Methodist Health Services Corp. in Peoria, Ill., is suing its larger local competitor for more than $300 million, saying the bigger hospital is breaking state and federal antitrust laws in contracts with insurance companies. The complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Peoria is a variation on a type of dispute at issue in several antitrust cases in recent years involving exclusionary terms in contracts between hospitals and insurers.
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CLEVELAND—MetroHealth System received approval from federal regulators on a complex legal maneuver that could extend Medicaid coverage to as many as 30,000 people in Cuyahoga County earlier than they would qualify for the coverage if the state expands eligibility in 2014 under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The health system, which is subsidized by Cuyahoga County, has been working on the waiver since the fall of 2011. The plan would extend healthcare coverage for county residents ages 19 to 64 who are uninsured, not eligible for regular Medicaid and have an...
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COLUMBIA, Mo.—Statewide health information exchanges in Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska and Illinois will be able to send and receive basic healthcare messages between each using the federally developed secure messaging protocol. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at HHS launched an effort in 2010 to develop a simplified method of “peer-to-peer” health information exchange under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Federal health IT authorities saw the system, dubbed Direct, as the key component of its broader program to...
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CHICAGO—University of Chicago Medicine will open a 10-story, $700 million replacement hospital next month, and officials gave politicians and other VIPs a sneak peek at the hospital last week. The hospital is set to admit its first patients Feb. 23. The new facility, named the Center for Care and Discovery, will serve as the center of the University of Chicago Medicine campus. It replaces a building constructed in 1983. Officials plan to convert the old building into a rehabilitation facility and make all of its rooms private. Workers began construction on the new hospital in...
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North Dakota's oil boom is leading to a corresponding healthcare building boom. In the town of Dickinson, healthcare systems started construction on a new clinic and medical office building, and one of the systems is on the verge of replacing its existing 25-bed hospital with a new facility.
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CHICAGO—The estimated cost of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago's new tower in downtown Chicago has shot up more than 10% since January, to nearly $523 million, as hospital executives fine-tune their plans, according to an application filed with the Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board. To finance the project, the institute has raised nearly half of its goal of $300 million in donations. Founded in 1954, the specialty hospital is well-known for its treatment of patients with complex medical conditions, such as spinal cord injuries. The hospital has scaled...
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GRAND BLANC, Mich.—Ascension Health's Michigan division announced the formation of Reverence Home Health & Hospice, a statewide home-care provider. The plan includes 15 Ascension hospitals in Michigan and other facilities from Borgess Health, Genesys Health System, St. John Providence Health System, St. Joseph Health System and St. Mary's of Michigan. St. Mary's is the only Ascension ministry in Michigan that lacks an existing home-care agency, but it will offer health and hospice services when Reverence launches. Officials plan on launching Reverence on Jan. 1, and it will be...
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After much speculation, Beaumont Health System, Royal Oak, Mich., and Henry Ford Health System, Detroit, signed a letter of intent to merge, creating a new not-for-profit system with eight hospitals in Southeast Michigan.
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DEXTER, Mo.—SunLink Health Systems, Atlanta, sold its interest in Missouri Southern Healthcare to the Southeast Missouri Hospital Association, Cape Girardeau, in a $9.8 million deal. The transaction is expected to yield net proceeds of about $7 million. Robert Thornton, chairman and CEO of SunLink, said in a news release that the system intends to use the funds to “improve our remaining hospitals, repay debt and for general corporate purposes.” The deal represents SunLink's second divestiture this year. The system in March said it planned to sell its Memorial Hospital...
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