The board of Boston-based Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center imposed a $50,000 fine on chief executive Paul Levy for undisclosed lapses of judgment in a personal relationship with a female employee and said it will consider the matter in setting his salary for next year. Board chairman Stephen Kay said in a written statement that "outside counsel" found that Levy did not violate hospital policies, but that "over time the situation created an improper appearance and became a distraction within the hospital."
While executives at Miami-based Jackson Health System struggled to get the mayor to agree to a $11.8 million contract with PricewaterhouseCoopers, Miami-Dade County commissioners approved a measure giving itself the power to create an oversight board to take over the struggling hospital system if its present financial crisis deepens. The oversight board would consist of seven members. The oversight board measure doesn't become law until it's approved by the commission at a second reading, scheduled for May 18.
Mayo Clinic has opened a heart clinic in Northfield, MN. Mayo cardiologists will see patients at Northfield Hospital three days a week and be available via teleconferencing for another two days a week. Mayo also plans to build a $10 million outpatient cancer treatment center in Northfield, to open in 2011.
LifePoint Hospitals Inc. said it completed its acquisition of the 100-bed Clark Regional Medical Center in Winchester, KY. The Brentwood, TN-based hospital chain said it plans to invest $60 million to build and equip a new, 132,000-square-foot replacement hospital. Other terms of the transaction weren't disclosed. Clark Regional has net revenues of about $60 million, The Tennessean reports.
Mammograms detect few cancers in women under the age of 40 but cause expense and anxiety because women frequently get "false positives" that require follow-up to rule out cancer, researchers reported. Mammograms did not detect any tumors among women under the age of 25, the researchers reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. The study of more than 117,000 U.S. women may reinforce controversial recommendations about the use of mammograms to screen for breast cancer among younger women.
Locked in contentious contract talks, 14 hospitals in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and their 12,000 nurses are bracing for a strike that could start as soon as June 1. The nurses will vote May 19 whether to authorize a walkout. Nurses say the hospitals are using the weak economy as an excuse to cut pension benefits and change work rules in ways that will endanger patients. The hospitals, which are nonprofit, say that they're merely adapting to economic realities and that patients will be fine.