A lawsuit filed Wednesday charges that the recent merger between tax-supported Bert Fish Medical Center and privately owned Florida Hospital is invalid because of multiple Sunshine Law violations during negotiations by the public hospital's board. The plaintiff is the Bert Fish Foundation, which in 1966 donated the New Smyrna Beach hospital to the Southeast Volusia Hospital District. Now, the foundation charges the district's agreement to lease and eventually sell the facility to Florida Hospital is the result of a tainted process. The foundation seeks to replace the hospital board and begin merger negotiations anew.
Despite giving patients good value and a positive experience, the for-profit, physician-run Medical Center at Elizabeth Place remains at a financial disadvantage compared to local nonprofit hospitals, its leaders claim. While “thriving clinically,” MCEP’s revenues and patient volumes have grown more slowly than expected, said CEO Alex Rintoul. Revenues are on pace to reach $16.5 million this year, up 10 percent from last year’s $15 million, he said. Patient volumes are on track to increase 10 percent to 15 percent from a year earlier, about half the increase MCEP had expected after landing contracts last year with Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Ohio and UnitedHealthcare. The slow volume growth partly reflects patients delaying elective surgeries during a down economy. But Rintoul and Dr. John Fleishman, chairman of MCEP’s board, also believe less generous contracts with Anthem and UnitedHealthcare have hurt financial performance, revenue growth and profit margins.
The larger a pregnant woman is when she checks in on delivery day, the greater her risk of having a cesarean section, suggests a large new study. Nearly one of every three births in the U.S. is now delivered by cesarean, a surgery that has been linked to complications for both mom and baby such as infection, bleeding and hysterectomy. This rate is about 50 percent higher than it was in the mid-1990s, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "As clinicians, we are faced with so many issues when taking care of patients with higher BMI, and one of them is a greater risk for cesarean," lead researcher Michelle Kominiarek, MD, of Indiana University told Reuters Health. She added that while previous studies had already linked cesarean delivery and body mass index -- a measure of weight that takes into account height -- none had been large or detailed enough to determine how other factors might alter that risk, such as prior births or cesarean sections.
Four Massachusetts community hospitals are investigating how thousands of patient health records, some containing Social Security numbers and sensitive medical diagnoses, ended up in a pile at a public dump. The unshredded records includedpathology reports with patients’ names, addresses, and results of breast, bone, and skin cancer tests, as well as the results of lab work following miscarriages. By law, medical records and documents containing personal identifying information must be disposed of in a way that protects privacy, and leaving them at a dump is probably illegal, privacy lawyers and hospital officials said. Violators face steep fines. A Globe photographer discovered the records July 26 when he was dumping his trash at the Georgetown Transfer Station. When he got out of his car, he said, he saw a huge pile of paper about 20 feet wide by 20 feet long. Upset that the paper wasn’t being recycled, he looked more closely.
A new kind of audit is becoming standard procedure in many workplaces. Looking for ways to cut costs, employers are requiring workers to produce marriage licenses, birth certificates, student IDs and partial tax returns to prove their listed dependents are eligible for health-insurance coverage. Such "dependent audits" are on the rise in the private and public sectors. A survey released by human-resources firm Towers Watson in March found that 69% of large employers planned to audit their plans this year, up from 55% in 2008. The audits uncover children who are too old for coverage or aren't students as claimed, ex-spouses who are not eligible for coverage and non-family members. Employers typically don't delve too deeply into whether the oversight was intentional; most are satisfied to resolve the issue and move on.
About 3,000 people each year visit the mobile Family Van in Boston for free checks of their blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol level. The nonprofit clinic affiliated with Harvard University provides simple tests that can give an early warning of an impending health problem or help manage an existing condition, such as diabetes. The van -- which visits six low-income neighborhoods around Boston weekly -- is one of about 2,000 such mobile clinics in the United States. Advocates say the approach can help control the rising cost of healthcare by helping people with chronic diseases to stay out of the emergency room, often the first recourse for inner-city residents.