Massachusetts health officials say a patient at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Needham mysteriously contracted Legionnaires' disease. The Massachusetts Department of Public Health calls it a "healthcare associated" case, but how the patient got it inside the hospital is unknown. Legionnaires' is not transmitted from person to person. Rather, it's caught from a specific bacteria in soil or water — for example, by inhaling infected droplets from air conditioning units, hot tubs or showers.
Mayo Clinic has reached a settlement with Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison's office that makes certain patients presumptively eligible for charity care and limits how the health system collects on medical debt. The Rochester-based nonprofit healthcare provider, which denied wrongdoing and disputed the attorney general's findings, will no longer collect debts through lawsuits other than in "extraordinary circumstances," according to Ellison's office. The agreement between the health care provider and the state's chief enforcer of consumer protection laws ended a two-year investigation into allegations that Mayo Clinic was suing to collect on debts from patients who were eligible for charity care.
An Indiana hospital seeking to take over its rival won a reprieve when lawmakers watered down a bill that threatened the proposed deal. But now it faces a likely showdown with the state's new governor.
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.