James Gonzalez, who helped transform the Broadway House for HIV and AIDS patients into one of the nation's top nursing homes, has been promoted to acting president/CEO of University Hospital at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark. He takes the helm just as the hospital has garnered national recognition for performance but also as UMDNJ faces the possibility of major restructuring, as recently recommended by a state task force.
MetroHealth System has agreed to hire a consultant as its interim chief financial officer and pay him up to $576,000 a year plus expenses while it continues to pay the former CFO's $440,000 salary plus benefits. Consultant Jeff Rooney of Martinville Dunn will be up to $40,000 a month, be reimbursed for expenses, including travel from Chicago, his lodging here, food and up to a 20% performance bonus when his contract ends. The taxpayer-funded hospital board voted 8-0 to hire Rooney with two members absent.
CFO Jason Paret is leaving the Soldotna hospital to work at North Hawaii Community Hospital in Waimea, Hawaii. His resignation is effective Sept. 2. Officials say the recruitment process has started, and administrators will soon announce plans to hire a temporary financial officer. CEO Ryan Smith earlier this month announced he's resigning in mid-November for a job in Wyoming.
In Troy, NY, a secular healthcare system now in the process of merging with two Catholic institutions devised a way to keep providing sterilizations banned by Catholic doctrine -- creating a hospital within a hospital. But earlier this year, a similar merger plan fell apart in Sierra Vista, AZ, where doctors were instructed to follow Catholic rules in preparation for the merger and some balked at denying certain services to women – -- including a pregnant patient who had miscarried one twin and was losing the other, yet was sent nearly 80 miles away for a medical procedure to complete the miscarriage. As Louisville's University Hospital prepares for an impending merger that would require the public hospital to follow Catholic doctrine, The Courier-Journal has found that similar secular-Catholic hospital unions have had mixed success -- with some doctors saying they haven't had problems or have found creative solutions, while others complain they were forced to deny needed care.
Despite numerous malpractice suits and warnings from their own doctors and staff that Stefan Konasiewicz posed a risk to patients, St. Luke's hospital continued to allow the neurosurgeon to practice. One possible reason: Konasiewicz, who worked at St. Luke's from 1997 to 2008, produced significant revenues for the hospital by performing more neurosurgeries than his peers in Duluth. And during Konasiewicz's time at St. Luke's, the hospital went from the red to the black, financial records obtained by the News Tribune show. "The assumption from many people was that St. Luke's didn't deal with him because he was bringing in so much revenue," said Suzanne Canfield, a retired surgical technician who worked in St. Luke's neurosurgery department. "Many physicians and anesthesiologists had concerns about him right from the beginning. But what bothered me was that administration didn't address them," she said. "At least, nothing ever changed."
Fewer medical students are choosing to go into primary care at a time when demand for their services is expected to increase as more people gain access to care through the federal healthcare overhaul. Eighty percent of Missouri, including all of southeastern Missouri, has been designated a Health Provider Shortage Area by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. That means one in five Missourians is without access to primary healthcare, according to the Missouri Foundation for Health. The problem is worse in rural areas, said Thomas McAuliffe, policy analyst with the foundation. Only about 12% of Missouri medical school graduates went into family medicine in 2009, according to the Missouri Primary Care Association. Declining reimbursements from insurance companies and the hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical school debt doctors graduate with are both contributing to the shortage of primary care physicians, she said. Primary care doctors earn about half what specialists do, according to the Medical Group Management Association.