Upon completing a thorough nationwide executive search, Central Peninsula Hospital in Soldotna, Alaska, has hired Richard Davis to fill the role of chief executive officer. A seasoned healthcare executive with nearly 20 years of senior leadership experience, Davis will immediately assume his new duties at Central Peninsula. Davis joined Central Peninsula Hospital as chief operating officer in August 2011. Davis has a proven track record in the Alaska healthcare landscape, serving in leadership roles at Alaska Regional Hospital and Providence Hospital in Anchorage.
We asked a diverse group of health-care policy experts to discuss, in an exchange of emails, whether ACOs are an answer to what ails the health-care system. Our panelists: Donald M. Berwick, who stepped down Dec. 2 as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; Tom Scully, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator from 2001 to 2004 and Jeff Goldsmith president of Health Futures Inc., a health-care consulting firm, and an associate professor of public-health sciences at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville.
As the nation's economic slump continues, growing numbers of uninsured patients are straining community health facilities such as the Family Health Centers and Park DuValle Community Health Center, which between them operate 10 clinics in Louisville and one in Taylorsville. Officials of both organizations said visits by such patients rose 20 percent from 2007 to 2010 and now constitute more than half of their patient base.
UPMC filed motions Friday accusing West Penn Allegheny Health System of refusing to comply with a discovery request in the latter's antitrust lawsuit against the former. West Penn sued UPMC and Highmark in 2009, saying they colluded to stifle competition. West Penn then released Highmark from the suit when the insurer essentially bought the region's second-largest hospital system.
Dr. Richard Young wants to revamp the rules for family medicine to create an environment in which doctors have more time to get to know their patients. He believes that would improve primary care and save on emergency care spending.
He sketched out a proposal that resulted in his being selected as the only Texan to serve as an advisor to a new federal innovation center under the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
From 2005 to 2010, the MetroHealth System's police department regularly arrested and detained people—even though it lacked the legal authority to do so. The health system calls its four dispatchers and nearly 60 state-trained peace officers and security guards "a full-service police department." But they are not police. The department lost its power to arrest and detain people when the city amended an ordinance granting that right in 2004.