HHS has removed a former surgeon general's warning declaring gun violence a public health crisis to comply with the president's executive order to protect Second Amendment rights, according to a White House official. Giffords, the gun violence prevention group founded by former Rep. Gabby Giffords, announced on Monday that former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy's advisory recognizing gun violence as a public health crisis was wiped from HHS' website.
A Mercer County hospital is preparing to reopen Tuesday, two months after closing in bankruptcy and being acquired by a California company. Sharon Regional Medical Center has been given the green light to reopen, pending the transfer of the hospital license to new owners, Tenor Health Foundation Sharon LLC, which has corporate offices in Pasadena. The hospital closed Jan. 6 as part of the financial restructuring of corporate parent Steward Health System.
The FTC again has urged the halt of a merger between Union Hospital and Terre Haute Regional Hospital, saying it would pose anti-competitive risks such as higher healthcare costs and lower wages for workers. The FTC raised the same concern in 2024 over an application for the same merger, which the hospitals withdrew in November. The two hospitals filed a new plan in February.
DispatchHealth and Medically Home - companies that work with health systems to provide hospital-level care at home – have agreed to merge, the firms announced Tuesday. Financial terms of the definitive agreement weren’t disclosed though those involved said Boston-based Medically Home will become part of DispatchHealth, which is based in Denver, once the deal closes "mid-year" 2025. The approaches of these two companies to bring high acuity care typically available in hospital settings to provide more healthcare into patient homes took on greater meaning during the COVID-19 pandemic as cases of the virus surged and patients looked for new safe and effective ways to get home-based care during the pandemic.
Silicon Valley is bullish on AI agents. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said agents will “join the workforce” this year. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella predicted that agents will replace certain knowledge work. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said that Salesforce’s goal is to be “the number one provider of digital labor in the world” via the company’s various “agentic” services. But no one can seem to agree on what an AI agent is, exactly.
For the past 19 months, officials in rural Martin County have been working on an experimental plan to resurrect the community's shuttered hospital. Martin General, the 43-bed facility that for seven decades served generations of residents in the Eastern North Carolina county, closed its doors in August 2023. The hospital was later placed into bankruptcy, a move that operator Quorum Health attributed to "financial challenges related to declining population and utilization trends." Ownership of the hospital eventually reverted to the county, which had been leasing the building to Quorum.