Blue Hill Memorial Hospital has announced a buyout plan aimed at creating permanent budget reductions and avoiding layoffs, according to a news release from the hospital. The hospital is calling its initiative a "voluntary separation incentive plan," under which all employees can apply for the buyouts, but administrators may choose to deny some applications. BHMH used dire language in describing the need for the buyout program, saying the hospital "must be ready to embrace the changes on our doorsteps or face the consequences of failing to keep pace—which could mean an end to healthcare delivery as we know it on the peninsula."
Aetna Life Insurance Co. is suing Jacksonville over the city's decision to have Florida Blue provide its health insurance, a job Aetna had been doing since 1999. In its lawsuit, filed last week, Aetna says that meetings to pick an insurance firm were not noticed in accordance with state open-meeting laws, and that the city did not follow its own procurement procedures in making the selection. The company decries the selection process as "clearly erroneous, contrary to competition, and arbitrary and capricious." Aetna didn’t get points for providing a two-year rate guarantee to the city, for example, it says, while Florida Blue only guaranteed its rates for one year.
More than 300 former patients have filed suits against a southern Kentucky hospital and associated agencies alleging they underwent unnecessary heart procedures carrying high risks. The lawsuits were filed in Laurel County Circuit Court against St. Joseph London. Around 30 lawsuits were filed by Louisville attorney Hans Poppe last year alone. The lawsuits include claims that patients were given unnecessary heart procedures which information from the American Heart Association indicates has serious risks, including death in some cases.
Ascension Health Alliance, the parent organization of Ascension Health, announced an agreement today to acquire Tulsa, Okla.-based Marian Health System, which operates 36 hospitals and 150 clinics in the Midwest. Marian Health would continue to lead three regional health systems in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Kansas that would become part of Ascension Health, according to a spokesman for the Edmundson-based health system. "It's a merger. They will become part of Ascension Health," said Ascension Health spokesman Steve LeResche.
Doctors and nurses may overestimate the quality of the care they provide hospital patients in the hours leading up to a serious complication, according to a small new study. After reviewing the records of 47 patients, Dutch researchers found that for more than half there were delays in recognizing that the patients' conditions were deteriorating in advance of a crisis, such as an unplanned admission to intensive care. Meanwhile nurses, doctors-in-training and specialists reported far fewer delays.
Focusing on providers is key because healthcare expenses are so concentrated: High-cost cases account for the vast majority of the total. In those cases, the care provided is, as it should be, mainly the services and tests recommended by the provider. So if you do not influence provider recommendations in those cases, you cannot do all that much to improve the system. The evidence suggests, furthermore, that shifting away from paying for quantity and toward paying for quality affects what providers do in those high-cost cases. Although other quality- improvement measures can also influence provider behavior, the payment system is arguably the single most important determinant.