Friends Hospital, a 200-year-old psychiatric hospital in Northeast Philadelphia, announced that it has added two new members to its administrative staff and three to its clinical staff. Eve Townsend has joined as director of Social Services. Tamika Stewart has assumed the role of director of Utilization Management. James Jones, MD is now Medical Director of the Friends Hospital Admissions & Evaluations Center. Jonathan Shack, MD, has joined Friends as Medical Director of a general adult unit.
The Horn Memorial Hospital Board of Directors has named Marc Augsburger as CEO/administrator. Augsburger was formerly the vice president of operations at Caro Memorial Hospital in Caro, MI. He began his duties at Horn Memorial Hospital Nov. 30.
Gregory Semerdjian, MD, has been named senior vice president/CMO for Franciscan Health System. For the past 10 years, Semerdjian served as vice president for medical and clinical operations for Denver-based Catholic Health Initiatives. CHI is among the largest non-profit health systems in the United States, with 75 hospitals and other care facilities in 19 states. Franciscan Health System is affiliated with CHI. Semerdjian, who served as Franciscan's interim CMO since July 31, succeeds Mike Newcomb, DO, who accepted a senior leadership position at Legacy Health System in Portland, OR.
Marilyn Schock, former associate administrator at Banner Health's 132-bed McKee Medical Center, will now serve as the hospital's CEO. Schock, the interim CEO, assumes the permanent position effective immediately. She has more than 23 years at Banner Health. For the past 14 months, Schock has served as the associate administrator for North Colorado Medical Center in Greeley—a 398-bed hospital operated by Banner Health.
A Senate plan to cut Medicare to pay for an overhaul of the health system would threaten the profitability of roughly one in five hospitals and nursing homes over the next decade, according to an analysis by Rick Foster, chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. In a report, Foster questioned the sustainability of many of the proposed cuts, the major source of funding in a plan to extend insurance to more than 30 million additional Americans, the Washington Post reports. The proposal to reduce payments to hospitals and other providers to force them to adopt more efficient practices could prove particularly problematic for institutions that serve large numbers of Medicare patients, Foster wrote in the analysis.
In a setback for Democratic leaders, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, said that he would vote against healthcare legislation in its current form. The bill's supporters had said earlier that they thought they had secured Lieberman's agreement to go along with a compromise they worked out to overcome an impasse within the Democratic Party. But Lieberman told the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to scrap the idea of expanding Medicare and abandon any new government insurance plan or lose his vote, the New York Times reports.