The historic U.S. economic downturn has directly affected the healthcare industry, and mounting evidence confirms that demand for services is down across the board. One strategy is to steal market share: Go into your market aggressively and capture the volumes that still exist. Excellent idea. But how do you do it?
A longtime practitioner of yoga and meditation, fashion designer Donna Karan has contributed $850,000 to the Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City to bring yoga therapy and a new kind of caregiving to the cancer wing. Karan believes the research attached to the one-year grant will show that hospital stays can be shortened and fewer anxiety drugs administered, which would save the patient and insurance companies money.
Big Nashville-based hospital chains should brace for stepped-up efforts to recruit their nurses if a series of mergers and agreements among some of the nation's largest healthcare workers' unions achieves organizers' goals. Nurse organizers expect that a larger organization with 150,000 members and the arrangement with the Service Employees International Union will provide a boost to organizing efforts at chains such as HCA. Recruiting nurses has been difficult in Southern states, including Tennessee, where laws don't allow for mandatory union membership at work.
Advocate Health Care, the Chicago area's largest provider of medical care with nine hospitals, has announced that there will be no merger with the parent of Rockford Memorial Hospital. Advocate and Rockford Health System agreed to let expire their letter of intent to explore a merger.
Walgreen Co. announced that its Take Care Health Systems group, which operates a chain of health clinics located inside about 700 Walgreen drugstores, will provide free healthcare services to patients who lose their jobs. Under the plan, Walgreen said, existing Take Care clinic patients who lose their jobs and who are without health insurance will be eligible for free care at the clinics throughout the rest of 2009. The offer covers family members of the patients as well.
A group of leading doctors and researchers called on medical associations to sharply limit the funding they receive from the drug and device companies. The new proposals, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, call for associations to refuse general budget support from industry. The recommendations, which aren't binding, would allow the groups to continue to accept industry advertising in medical journals and payments for industry-sponsored booths at doctors' conferences.