Hospitals made disastrous decisions in the 1990s in hiring doctors. Now, they're again buying physician practices—saying better management will make the difference this time. The American Hospital Association reports that the number of doctors working for hospitals has increased by 32 percent since 2000, a trajectory that's accelerating as medical companies prepare for healthcare reform.
A crude new method of making methamphetamine poses a risk even to Americans who never get anywhere near the drug: It is filling hospitals with thousands of uninsured burn patients requiring millions of dollars in advanced treatment—a burden so costly that it's contributing to the closure of some burn units.
Catholic Healthcare West, one of the nation's largest hospital systems, is ending its governing board's affiliation with the Catholic Church and changing its name, two steps intended to help the system expand throughout the states in which it operates—California, Arizona and Nevada—and beyond. The changes underscore the unique challenges facing Catholic hospitals in the marketplace, where there are tremendous financial pressures for hospitals to merge or form formal alliances with other health care providers in order to survive and thrive.
North Jersey hospitals increasingly ask patients for cash deposits or credit-card imprints before they undergo surgery or high-priced tests. They know it's easier to collect when the patient is in the waiting room, anxious to get a medical problem diagnosed or treated. Under intense financial pressure, hospital financial executives no longer wait months to bill the patient after insurance has paid.
Job vacancy rates at some Dayton-area hospitals are the lowest they've been in years, and nurse shortages—at least for now—have disappeared. In a sign of how much today's employment landscape for nurses has changed, Good Samaritan Hospital in recent weeks routinely told nurses to stay home just before their shifts were scheduled to begin. The hospital acknowledged its use of "flex time" has generated complaints from nurses, some of whom lost up to a third of their regularly scheduled hours during the holidays.
Kaiser Permanente soon will renegotiate its contracts with the three Coachella Valley hospitals, and Eisenhower Medical Center, which lost its contract with the HMO about three years ago, is back in the competition. The health maintenance organization, which does not have a hospital of its own in the valley, has had an exclusive contract for three years with Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs and John F. Kennedy Memorial Hospital in Indio.