Kerry Swanson, COO at Alliance (OH) Community Hospital, has been named president of St. Mary's Janesville Hospital. Swanson will oversee the construction, opening, and ongoing operations of the new 50-bed St. Mary's Janesville Hospital, which is set to open in 2010. She will begin her duties on Jan. 4.
Eli Lilly executive Jack Bailey as been appointed the 2009 chair of the Joint Commission Resources Board of Directors and LaMar S. McGinnis, MD, as the JCR board's vice chair. JCR is a nonprofit affiliate of The Joint Commission. McGinnis is a clinical professor of surgery at Emory University and senior medical advisor and liaison with the American Cancer Society, both in Atlanta.
HCA, the nation's largest hospital chain, has appointed Donald W. Stinnett to the currently vacant position of senior vice president and controller. Stinnett now serves as the CFO for HCA's eastern group and has been with the company since 1999.
Hospitals in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area have experienced the nation's recession firsthand in falling patient numbers and rising bad debt. A freeze-up in the nation's financial markets has compounded their woes. Several hospitals, operating on razor-thin margins, have seen interest rates on their debt soar in the last six months even as millions of dollars evaporated from their investment portfolios.
For five years, Marvin O'Quinn has headed one of South Florida's biggest institutions, Jackson Health System, a billion-dollar enterprise with three main hospitals and 12 primary care centers.
He took over Jackson when the public system had just suffered an $85 million loss. Thanks to county support and a half-penny sales tax, he has kept the budget pretty well balanced. At the end of December, he's stepping down to take a job as chief operating officer with a West Coast hospital system with more than 40 hospitals. In this Q&A with the Miami Herald, O'Quinn discusses difficult times, past and present, and his sometimes testy relationship with the University of Miami.
A major California healthcare workers' union and its parent union are locked in a struggle that could end in early 2009 in a takeover, with the state labor leaders dismissed and replaced by leaders of the larger group. If that is the outcome in the fight between California's SEIU United Healthcare Workers-West, representing 150,000 health care workers, and Service Employees International Union, the nation's fastest-growing union, the ramifications may be messy.