Five nonprofit hospitals in San Francisco's received $79 million in tax breaks intended to compensate them for providing free care to the city's poor and uninsured in 2007, but they spent just $16 million on charity care, according to a report. California Pacific Medical Center was responsible for the vast majority of the disparity, the report showed. California Pacific received close to $70 million in tax breaks, while spending $5.2 million on charity care.
The approval of an agreement to reinvent the management structure of Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta has been overshadowed by confirmation that county commissions could scuttle the deal. Fulton and DeKalb must approve the plan because the Georgia counties have bond agreements with Grady, said Lewis Horne, an attorney hired by Grady to help craft the lease.
"Friday Night at the ER" is a decision-making game developed by a consultant from Johns Hopkins University designed to help hospital departments to work together more efficiently. Four-player teams try to juggle a limited number of hospital beds, a relentless influx of patients and a gradual attrition of nurses to care for them. The decisions come while racing against a clock that forces faster and faster decisions, and every so often game cards announce another mini-crisis to ramp up the pressure.
U.S. medical schools are increasingly plugging geriatric courses into their curricula and adding specially trained faculty members as they respond to an imminent boom in the number of older Americans and the need to better understand how to properly care for the elderly. Out of 800,000 doctors in the United States, roughly 7,000 are geriatricians. The country needs another 13,000 to adequately care for today's older population, according to the American Geriatrics Society, and the shortfall could reach 36,000 by 2030.
CheckUps, an operator of walk-in medical clinics, has shut down 23 of the clinics operating in Wal-Mart stores in Florida and three other Southern states. CheckUps fell behind in paying its nurses and other vendors late in 2007 after running short of cash to meet its bills, according to a lawyer for one of its creditors. Wal-Mart has leased space to about 80 clinics in stores across the country, and company representatives said it hoped the CheckUps clinics would not stay vacant for long.
Susan Ryan, the administrator of Kaiser Permanente's Fresno, CA, hospital, has resigned. The decision comes days after a federal report criticized the way the medical center responded to complaints about a doctor who handled high-risk pregnancies. The review was the latest in a series of critical assessments of the nation's largest health maintenance organization.