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.
For six months, Los Angeles County supervisors have courted the University of California as their last, best hope to reopen Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital. But then Mark Ridley-Thomas was sworn in as the newest board member. He immediately signaled that, as far as the troubled hospital in his district is concerned, he wants to be considered the first among equals.
David Krause, president and chief executive of the Parkland Foundation, says those who make generous contributions to the foundation's $150 million "I Stand for Parkland" campaign will receive naming rights. The campaign was created last year in anticipation of the public's approval of the Nov. 4 bond vote for a new Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. Krause says naming rights will be available for "trauma centers and burn centers, surgery suites, patient rooms, major services, classrooms, labs" and many other venues in the new Parkland.
Conshohocken, PA-based Take Care Health Systems Inc., which operates nearly 300 health clinics in Walgreens drugstores, has opened some clinics near home. Take Care has opened retail clinics in the last two weeks in Brookhaven and King of Prussia in Pennsylvania, Sicklerville and Westmont in New Jersey, and Wilmington, DE. The Walgreens subsidiary plans to have 15 to 25 clinics in the region by the end of 2009, said Take Care representatives.
Advocate Health Care has made its merger talks with the parent of Rockford (IL) Memorial Hospital, saying the two hospital operators have signed a letter of intent to enter "exclusive talks" about a strategic partnership. Neither party would elaborate on the scope of the talks. "Due to the confidential nature of the discussions, details surrounding the specific elements of the proposal are not yet available," the companies said in a statement. Advocate, based in suburban Oak Brook, operates nine hospitals throughout the Chicago area.
Contractors Booz Allen Hamilton and Advanced Pharmacy Concepts recently joined 30 CMS officials in a series of 240 "secret shopping" missions involving 30 health plans. Mystery shoppers working for the government have found that some insurance companies weren't giving out full information on deductibles, restrictions, and co-pays for private Medicare plans. CMS froze one firm's marketing and has sent warning letters to some others, as a result.
