A hospital in North Idaho is marketing itself to Canadian tourists — medical tourists, that is. Most of the patients who come into Northwest Specialty Hospital in Post Falls, Idaho, are from the local area — plus a few from Washington and Montana. But hospital CEO Rick Rasmussen is thinking big — Canada big. A little Canadian flag was recently added in the upper right of the hospital's website. The link goes to a list of procedures with some of the longest wait times north of the border. Total knee, total hip, total shoulder, ACL repair — all with the prices listed.
Easton Hospital has agreed to pay $662,000 to the federal government in a settlement involving allegations that the Wilson Borough hospital fraudulently billed Medicare. The U.S. Attorney's Office on Monday announced the settlement, which includes the stipulation that the hospital denies the allegations. Two former hospital employees initially filed a complaint against the hospital claiming they observed urological procedures and tests performed at the hospital that were medically unnecessary, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office. Medicare was billed for the procedures, the statement says.
Sitka Community Hospital administrators are seeking $1.5 million from the city in a nine-month line of credit to address a cash flow emergency. Administrators are planning to go before the city Assembly on Tuesday to make a formal request, the Daily Sitka Sentinel reported. "We have zero days' cash on hand," hospital CEO Jeff Comer said. "The perfect storm has hit, and we're getting into cash crisis mode, which is why we're going to the Assembly." City administrator Mark Gorman said the financial help would not be an outright grant.
According to a 10-year retrospective study, high-risk patients with acute myocardial infarction (MI) were also less likely to receive percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), according to Anupam Jena, MD, PhD, of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, both in Boston, and colleagues. The results appear in JAMA Internal Medicine. Using data collected from Medicare claims from 2002 to 2011, Jena's group identified 211,058 hospitalizations to teaching hospitals for acute MI, heart failure, and cardiac arrest that occurred during the American Heart Association (AHA) and American College of Cardiology (ACC) meetings.
It was a frenetic year in the healthcare world as ObamaCare took root and Ebola fears swept the country. While the healthcare law survived a rough first year, the Obama administration was faced with new uncertainty as the Supreme Court decided to consider the validity of the insurance subsides it provides. And in an added headache for ObamaCare defenders, consultant Jonathan Gruber became a household name thanks to viral clips of him insulting voters when discussing passage of the law. Here are the five healthcare stories that mattered this year.
Medicare has begun punishing 721 hospitals with high rates of infections and other medical errors, cutting payments to half of the nation's major teaching hospitals and many institutions that are marquee names. Intermountain Medical Center in Utah, Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, the Cleveland Clinic, Geisinger Medical Center in Pennsylvania, Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, NYU Langone Medical Center and Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago are all being docked 1 percent of their Medicare payments through next September, federal records show. In total, hospitals will forfeit $373 million, Medicare estimates.