A private healthcare consultant has recommended that the new University Medical Center, the Charity Hospital successor, be a $1.09 billion project constructed without assuming any state debt, a model that would reduce the long-projected price tag by almost $200 million and farm out part of the construction cost to a third party. The plan, authored by Verite Healthcare Consulting, does not reduce the size or scope of the previous 424-bed, $1.2 billion plan long advanced by the Louisiana State University System, and it projects an average annual state appropriation of $52.5 million during the first six years of operation, as much as half previous projections included in a separate analysis presented by Kaufman Hall & Associates in June. Verite's range goes from $44.1 million in 2015, the first year of operation, to $60.3 million in 2020.
Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley has signed off on the sale of a pair of nonprofit community hospitals, Morton Hospital in Taunton and the bankrupt Quincy Medical Center, to the for-profit hospital chain Steward Health Care System. But Coakley imposed multiple conditions on the deal that are meant to safeguard patients and employees of the financially struggling hospitals. They included a guarantee that Boston-based Steward will not sell either one for at least five years, that it will keep making capital improvements after five years, and that it will continue providing in-hospital psychiatric beds and other services of at least the same scope that the Taunton and Quincy hospitals now offer. If Steward eventually opted to sell the hospitals, potential buyers would be bound by the terms of the conditions, according to the attorney general's office. Last year, Coakley attached similar conditions to Steward's acquisition of Caritas Christi Health Care, a chain of six Catholic community hospitals. That deal, like the Morton and Quincy sales, involved the transfer of organizations classified as public charities to an investor-owned business.
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center yesterday finalized a contract with its new CEO, Kevin Tabb, MD, who spent most of his adulthood in Israel before becoming a rising star at Stanford. He landed in Boston late Monday night and spent yesterday in meetings with managers and physician leaders and walking the floors of the Harvard teaching hospital, chatting with employees. Tabb, 47, who is the chief medical officer of Stanford Hospital and Clinics in California, will start his new job Oct. 17. The hospital did not disclose his salary or other terms of the agreement. Tabb said in an interview that it is too soon for him to lay out a detailed strategy, but that he expects to focus on preparing the hospital for the looming changes in the health care system, by improving efficiency and aligning with other hospitals and doctors groups. "This is the most competitive market in the country, and we need to be ready for change," Tabb said of the hospital. "It's clear to me we're going to have to form partnerships, that's one of the very first things I'll be working on."
A key component of children's hospital ratings may be statistically unreliable, fueling concerns over popular rankings used by millions of Americans every year, according to a new study. Researchers found that death rates across hospitals, which carry heavy weight in commercial rankings like the U.S. News & World Report Best Hospitals, are mostly indistinguishable from a statistical point of view. "It's like taking a stack of cards and shuffling them almost at random to put them in a rank order," said Chris Feudtner, MD, of The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, whose findings appear in the journal Pediatrics. "You are chasing after something that is being buffeted around by chance," he told Reuters Health. Hospital death rates have become an increasingly popular yardstick for the quality of care that patients receive around the country and have been made publicly available by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Two years ago, the Cleveland Clinic launched a new era of health care in Las Vegas. The world-class clinic partnered with the Lou Ruvo Brain Institute to create the first healthcare collaboration in Las Vegas involving a renowned hospital from outside Nevada. On Tuesday, Stanford Hospital & Clinics and St. Rose Dominican Hospitals followed suit, announcing they are operating a neurological clinic next to St. Rose—Siena Campus in Henderson. The joint venture is the first time Stanford has entered a medical partnership outside California. The agreement does not call for Stanford doctors to work in Henderson, but allows local neurologists to use Stanford's facilities and to take their patients there, as well as tap the university's academic research. An expanded St. Rose Center for Neurosurgery will open in January.
Future doctors aren't learning much about the unique health needs of gays and lesbians, a survey of medical school deans suggests. On average, the schools devoted five hours in the entire curriculum to teaching content related to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender patients, according to the survey results appearing in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association. A third of the schools had none during the years students work with patients. More than a quarter of the medical school deans said their school's coverage of 16 related topics was "poor" or "very poor." The topics included sex change surgery, mental health issues and HIV-AIDS. While nearly all medical schools taught students to ask patients if they "have sex with men, women or both" while obtaining a sexual history, the overall curriculum lacked deeper instruction to help "students carry that conversation as far as it needs to go," said lead author Juno Obedin-Maliver, MD, of the University of California, San Francisco. Without such education, doctors are left guessing and can make faulty assumptions, Obedin-Maliver said. For instance, lesbians need Pap tests, which screens for the sexually spread virus that causes most cervical cancer, as often as heterosexual women do. But some doctors assume they don't need them.