Mark Ganz, the CEO over Regence BlueCross BlueShield, one of Oregon's largest health plans, says healthcare should work more like other industries, which is why he brought executives from Nordstroms and Starbucks onto his board of directors. Not everyone appreciates Ganz's efforts. In recent years, the company once considered the conscience of the region's health insurers has steadily lost members, raised rates and become a lightning rod for complaints over slashed benefits.
Coming of age in the 1980s when Pac-Man was the newest rage, the pager has survived and evolved over three decades. It stubbornly remains a key piece of hospital communication at a time when a doctor without a smartphone has a technology dinosaur vibe. "We can have a robot assisting with surgery, yet we're still using pagers," said April Zepeda, spokeswoman for The Everett Clinic. Providence Regional Medical Center Everett has nearly a thousand pagers in use.
Investors in U.S. hospital companies can expect more scrutiny of billing practices and the medical need for expensive treatments as the federal government faces greater pressure to recoup billions in fraudulent claims, analysts said. HCA Holdings Inc., the largest for-profit hospital operator in the United States, said earlier this week that federal authorities were investigating whether heart procedures performed at some of its facilities were medically necessary.
Assurant Inc. has been cited by the U.S. for "unreasonable" health premium increases more times than any competitor. Assurant units raised premiums in excess of 10 percent on individual health plans 31 times in 12 states since October, according to documents provided by the U.S. Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight. The greatest increase was 24 percent on plans covering 17,666 people in Wisconsin in May.
Ascension Health has signed a new contract worth up to $1.7 billion with a Chicago-based debt collection firm that was banned for Minnesota for alleged hardball tactics. The bill collector, Accretive Health Inc., said in a filing Wednesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it has a new five-year national contract. But neither Accretive nor Ascension will say how many of the system's 80 hospitals currently use the collector or will do so under the new deal.
Dozens of hospitals across the country, including St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and Le Bonheur in Memphis, lost access to crucial electronic medical records for about five hours during a major computer outage last month, raising fresh concerns about whether poorly designed technology can compromise patient care. Cerner Corp. said "human error" caused the outage July 23 that it said affected an unspecified number of hospitals.