Most nonprofit hospitals don't readily reveal the salaries and compensation packages of their top executives to public scrutiny. That information is not on their Websites, and it's usually not in those glossy – and often irrelevant – community benefit reports that are long on portrait photographs, architectural designs, and colored pie charts, but short on detail.
They're not hiding the compensation, of course. They can't. That information is on the Form 990 filings that nonprofits submit to the Internal Revenue Service, which are easily accessible on GuideStar. But there is always a significant lag time in those filings, and much of the public may not be aware of how to access that data anyway.
Last week, for example, Rhode Island nonprofit Care New England declined news media requests to detail the compensation package for its new CEO Dennis Keefe. CNE spokeswoman May Kernan told a Providence, RI television station and later HealthLeaders Media that it was the three-hospital health system's "policy" to provide executive compensation information through the 990 reports.
I respectfully suggest that the policy be changed.
These are rough times for a lot of people. Unemployment hovers at nearly 10% for many sectors of the economy outside of healthcare and even in hospitals, there appear to be almost daily notices of layoffs. For workers everywhere, salaries are stagnant and healthcare inflation eats away at any marginal salary gains. It is not unreasonable to expect that nonprofit hospitals that receive significant tax breaks would be willing to share the compensation information on their top executives on a real-time basis.
Here's a more practical reason: The issue of executive compensation is not going away, and it's always better to ride the wave than risk the undertow. Executive compensation and the widening prosperity gap between the few at the top and everybody else are hot topics. So hot that the Los Angeles Times won a Pulitzer Prize in April for its coverage of outrageous salaries paid to city officials in Bell, CA.
That investigation broadened and led to the finding that three California hospital district CEOs were among the highest paid public workers in that state. Both stories got a lot of play, and assuredly did not go unnoticed by just about every assignment editor at every news outlet in the nation.
This is not to suggest that hospital executives aren't worth the compensation they're getting. Some probably aren't, but most are, and more than a few are probably underpaid. But it's hard to say either way when we don't have the information readily at hand. If you're a six-figure CEO, and you feel that you earn your keep, why not explain it to the public you serve? If you're uncomfortable justifying your compensation, maybe it can't be justified.
The fact is, when the compensation is put in its proper context, a few curmudgeons will still howl and write letters to the editor. They always do. But most people will understand a reasoned and honest explanation. Health systems and hospitals are huge, complicated, labor- and capital-intensive operations that require not only highly skilled professional oversight for complex day-to-day operations, but visionary thinking for strategic planning.
Bottom line: It's a question of trust. It's a hard sell if you want the community, and taxpayers at large who subsidize non-profit healthcare through tax breaks, to buy into your healing mission when you're not willing to say up front what the people at the top are paid.
The University of Colorado Hospital and Poudre Valley Health System announced jointly on Friday that they have signed a letter of intent to pursue a merger agreement.
If finalized, the merger would align the community care focus of PVHS –with UCH's academic and clinical expertise, PVHS CEO Rulon Stacey said in a blog post.
"I strongly believe that a partnership between PVHS and UCH will be a huge step forward in the landscape of healthcare in our region," Stacey blogged. "It will create the state's largest health system that is owned and operated by a Colorado company. The reach of the new system will cover at least as far and wide as our two organizations' current service areas of Colorado and the Rocky Mountain and High Plains regions."
Both organizations said the proposed merger was motivated not by an effort to save money, but to "muscle up" in anticipation of health insurance reform. "Nobody really knows yet what reform will look like," UCH President/CEO Bruce Schroffel said in a media release. "But we do know this: There will be less money in the system, and we will have to learn to do more with less."
Friday's announcement was the culmination of seven months of talks between Schroffel, Stacey, and their respective boards. A letter of intent was signed on Wednesday. The two organizations said they anticipate several months of negotiations, auditing, and planning before a joint operating agreement can be finalized, hopefully this fall.
"We have been going through many changes in recent times," Schroffel said in a message to UCH staff and physicians. "Now, too, we may soon lock arms with literally one of the finest community hospital systems in the country. You work at a place where all things are possible. I ask you to join me in imagining still more possibilities for our patients, our partners and ourselves."
Fort Collins, CO-based PVHS includes Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins and Medical Center of the Rockies in Loveland, which itself is a partnership with Regional West Health Services in Scottsbluff, NE. PVHS provides care across a 50,000-square-mile area in northern Colorado, Nebraska and Wyoming.
Denver-based UCH is the region's only academic hospital, and includes the 400-bed Anschutz Inpatient Pavilion. Although their names are similar, UCH is a separate entity, legally and financially, from the University of Colorado, and the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine.
NOTE: New rules on medical residents' hours issued by The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education became effective July 1, 2011.
A sweeping revamp of the rules that govern the nation's hospital residency programs is needed immediately to protect patients from the serious preventable errors that have been linked to the long working hours of exhausted physicians in training.
That's the message from a group of more than two dozen patient safety, medicine and research organizations, who are calling for the implementation of recommendations set forward in 2009 by the Institute of Medicine.
A white paper published in the current issue of the online journal Nature & Science of Sleepsays the rules for residency training set to take effect on July 1 "stop considerably short" of patient safety best practices. The report calls on hospital administrators and residency program directors to install additional safeguards.
"The current system amounts to an abuse of patient trust," Lucian Leape, MD, adjunct professor of health policy at the Harvard School of Public Health and a coauthor of the report, said in a media release. "Few people enter a hospital expecting that their care and safety are in the hands of someone who has been working a double-shift or more with no sleep. If they knew, and had a choice, the overwhelming majority would demand another doctor or leave."
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The report examining residency work hours, supervision, and safety is the product of a conference at Harvard Medical School last year that was held to draw a road map for implementation of the IOM recommendations. Those recommendations included eliminating shifts exceeding 16 hours without sleep for all resident physicians. The recommendations have yet to be implemented.
Starting July 1 the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education will limit the shifts of first-year residents to no more than 16 hours without sleep. However, ACGME will continue to permit shifts of 28 consecutive hours for more senior residents, including surgical residents.
The ACGME's pace for implementation of the IOM recommendations was singled out for criticism in the report, and by the advocacy groups. Charles Czeisler, MD, a coauthor of the report and chief of the Division of Sleep Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, in Boston said the ACGME has taken a "very limited" approach to the IOM's recommendations, noting that the ACGME's new rules will cover only "a small fraction" of the resident workforce and not get at the root of the problem.
"Extensive research has shown that experience does not overcome the need for sleep," Czeisler said in a media release. "There is no justification for maintaining unsafe work hours, other than that they're a good deal for hospitals. But they endanger patients, and they even endanger residents."
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Czeisler said ACGME enforcement was insufficient because it relies on self-regulation, and lacks external or public accountability.
Attempts to obtain comments from ACGME were unsuccessful.
Christopher Landrigan, MD, a co-author of the Harvard report and lead author of the North Carolina Patient Safety Study, says rates of harm due to medical error have been constant. "Adoption of even the best proven interventions to reduce medical errors – including elimination of shifts exceeding 16 consecutive hours for resident physicians – has been extremely poor," he said.
The Harvard recommendations cover six other areas: workload and supervision; moonlighting; resident physician safety; hand-over practices and training in quality improvement; monitoring and oversight of the ACGME; and funding for reform implementation.
Key recommendations include:
Limiting all resident work hours to shifts of 12 to 16 hours;
Making ACGME work-hour compliance a condition of participation for Medicare graduate medical education support.
Identifying in real time when a resident physician's workload is excessive and additional staff should be activated;
Requiring attending physicians to supervise all admissions;
Mandating in-house supervision for all critical care services, including emergency, intensive care and trauma services;
Making fatigue management a Joint Commission National Patient Safety Goal. The recommendations note that "fatigue is a safety concern not only for resident physicians, but for nurses, attending physicians and other healthcare workers."
Redesign resident workload requirements to maximize educational value. Much of what residents currently do – drawing blood, filling out paperwork and starting intravenous lines adds to their heavy workload and is more appropriately done by other hospital personnel.
Provide transportation to all residents who are too tired to drive home. In addition, hospitals should provide transportation for all residents who, for unforeseen reasons or emergencies, work consecutively for more than 24 hours.
Include moonlighting in work hour limits. Hospitals should establish formal policies on moonlighting and actively monitor resident physician moonlighting.
Medicare pays more than $9 billion a year to academic medical centers, which is used to cover residents' salaries. The report's authors said that re-designing training to eliminate dangerously long shifts, waste and inefficiency will produce savings that will help to offset the cost of hiring additional personnel if they are needed.
Healthcare provider and consumer groups joined ranks on Wednesday to blast a proposal in the U.S. Senate to impose a cap on federal spending, saying the "real-world" impact of the plan would cut more than $2.7 trillion from critical safety net programs.
The Commitment to American Prosperity (CAP) Act, sponsored by Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) and Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), would limit federal spending to about 21% of Gross Domestic Product and automatically cut across all federal programs in any year where spending is projected to exceed the cap.
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The Lewin Group was commissioned by a group of provider and consumer organizations to analyze the impact of the proposal and found that the CAP Act would cut $4.2 trillion from federal spending between 2013 and 2021, including: $1.3 trillion in Social Security; $859 billion in Medicare; and $575 billion in federal Medicaid payments to states.
"Arbitrary caps that don't take into account the growing healthcare needs of our aging population are bad news for the patients and communities hospitals serve," said Rich Umbdenstock, president/ CEO of the American Hospital Association. "Hospitals are already absorbing more than $155 billion in federal reductions as well as billions more in reductions in state Medicaid programs. Additional cuts of this magnitude would force most hospitals to operate in the red, just at a time when more people are turning to them for care."
Newly inaugurated American Medical Association President Peter Carmel, MD, said physicians understand the need to reduce the nation's deficit, but he suggested that budget cuts should be done with a scalpel and not a chainsaw.
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"We know from experience that across-the-board cuts to federal health programs are counterproductive to health system improvements and will ultimately limit access to care for patients," Carmel said. "With baby boomers entering Medicare and more patients joining Medicaid, the AMA encourages policymakers to focus on policy changes that will protect vulnerable patients while improving the fiscal health of the nation."
Under the CAP Act, The Lewin Group analysis found thatby 2021:
Social Security benefits would be cut by nearly 20%.
Cuts to Social Security and other income support programs would force 3.8 million people into poverty--2.1 million of them seniors, a 44% increase among this age group.
5.1 million people could lose their health insurance.
Dramatic reductions in fees for physician services would lead to fewer physicians participating in Medicare.
Cuts to hospitals could force most to operate in the red, jeopardizing access to care.
Up to 1.3 million healthcare workers could lose their jobs.
Cost shifting of federal payment shortfalls to private employers could lead to a nearly 5% increase in health insurance premiums for those in employer-sponsored plans.
"AARP understands the nation's long-term fiscal challenges must be confronted, but this discussion cannot simply be reduced to a budget exercise—this is about real people," said David Certner, AARP's Legislative Policy Director. "We oppose proposals that rely on arbitrary spending limits because they could result in harmful cuts to the critical Medicare, Social Security and long-term care benefits that allow millions of older Americans to live independently and age with dignity. Such proposals threaten the financial and health security of today's seniors and future generations."
It is not clear how much support the CAP Act has in Congress.Nevertheless, the groups that banded to oppose the proposal said similar consequences could result from any across-the-board measure that sets specific limits on spending. They want Congress to reject proposals that call for arbitrary spending caps.
The groups that commissioned The Lewin Group study include American Hospital Association, American Medical Association, AARP, American College of Cardiology and LeadingAge.
For more information, view a summary of the findings or the full report.
Peter W. Carmel, MD, a pediatric neurosurgeon practicing in Newark, NJ, was inaugurated Tuesday as the 166th president of the American Medical Association – the first neurosurgeon to be elected president of the nation’s oldest largest physicians’ organization.
"My heroes have always been doctors," Carmel said in his inaugural addressbefore colleagues at the AMA’s annual meeting in Chicago. "I can’t recall a day in my life when I did not admire doctors, did not want to be a doctor, nor doubted I would one day become a doctor."
Carmel said the AMA would continue to support physicians and fight for improvements in health reform as it continues to evolve.
"The AMA is the trusted advisor that America’s physicians need to help them navigate health reform and the overwhelming changes occurring in medicine," Carmel said. "Physicians can count on the AMA to use the powerful voice of our profession to help Congress get health reform right."
Carmel has served on the AMA Board of Trustees since 2002 and on the Council on Long Range Planning and Development. He chaired the advisory committee from 2006 to 2007. Carmel is a former president of the AMA Foundation and is on the Foundation Board, an AMA media release said.
He has served in both the American Association of Neurological Surgeons and the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. For 17 years, Carmel was a CNS representative in the House of Delegates, the AMA’s primary policy-making body.
The former chairman of the National Coalition for Research in Neurological Disease and Stroke, Carmel was subsequently chair of the National Foundation for Brain Research. He helped launch the Decade of the Brain initiative that raised millions of dollars in research money for neurological diseases and stroke.
Born in Brooklyn, NY, Carmel completed his medical training at the New York University School of Medicine and was research associate at the National Institutes of Health. He completed his residency in neurosurgery at the Neurological Institute of New York and obtained his doctorate in neuroanatomy from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Carmel was on the faculty at P&S for 27 years and was the founding chief of the Division of Pediatric Neurosurgery and a professor of neurological surgery.
In 1994 Carmel moved to the New Jersey Medical School, where he is now chairman of the Department of Neurological Surgery and co-medical director of the Neurological Institute of New Jersey. He operates at the University Hospital in Newark, NJ and is the second physician from New Jersey to hold the office of AMA president.
Carmel’s wife, Jacqueline Bello, MD, is a neuroradiologist. The couple lives in Manhattan, NY, the AMA said.
The number of septicemia and sepsis hospitalizations more than doubled between 2000 and 2008, resulting in much longer, costlier hospitals stays, and more problematic and often fatal outcomes for patients with the bloodstream infections, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"Reasons for these increases may include an aging population with more chronic illnesses; greater use of invasive procedures, immunosuppressive drugs, chemotherapy, and transplantation; and increasing microbial resistance to antibiotics. Increased coding of these conditions due to greater clinical awareness of septicemia or sepsis may also have occurred during the period studied," said the study, Inpatient Care for Septicemia or Sepsis: A Challenge for Patients and Hospitals, a data brief compiled by CDC's National Center for Health Statistics.
Hospitalizations for septicemia or sepsis as a principal diagnosis grew from 326,000 in 2000 to 727,000 in 2008. In the same time span, the rate of the hospitalizations also more than doubled from 11.6 per 10,000 population to 24 per 10,000, and cost an estimated $14.6 billion to treat in 2008, the report said.
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The report, like studies conducted by the Dartmouth Atlas and others, shows that there is little correlation between how much a hospital spends and the quality of patient outcomes.
"Even with this expenditure, the death rate was high. Patients who do survive severe cases are more likely to have negative long-term effects on health and on cognitive and physical functioning," the report said.
Last year, University of Michigan researchers found that older hospitalized patients who survive sepsis develop lasting, moderate to severe cognitive impairment and functional disability at 3.3 times the rate of patients hospitalized for other reasons. Those consequences were labeled a "public health disaster" in a JAMA commentary.
While accounting for only 2% of hospitalizations in 2008, sepsis and septicemia made up 17% of in-hospital deaths. And patients who survived hospitalization with sepsis or septicemia were twice as likely to be transferred to another short-term care facility, and three-times as likely to be transferred to a long-term care facility, the CDC study found.
The bloodstream infections overwhelmingly affected the elderly, most of whom are Medicare recipients. About two-thirds of patients hospitalized with sepsis or septicemia were age 65 or over, and the hospitalization rate for sepsis and septicemia patients aged 85 or older (271.2 per 10,000 population) was 30 higher than the rate for those under age 65, (9.5 per 10,000 population), and more than four times higher than the rate of hospitalization (65.7 per 10,000) for those ages 65-74, the report said.
The hospitalization rates include: patients hospitalized for septicemia or sepsis; patients hospitalized for another diagnosis but who had septicemia or sepsis at the time they were admitted; and patients who acquired septicemia or sepsis during their hospital stay.
Baptist Health System and Emerus announced Monday that they will partner to open four emergency hospitals in the San Antonio area.
"This gives us the opportunity to provide a broader range of services, and when we partner with a group like Baptist who has a lot of infrastructure in place we aren't starting from ground zero," Toby Hamilton, MD, CEO of privately held Emerus told HealthLeaders Media. "There is certainly a prestige with the Baptist brand, and we view this as an opportunity to get into that market, and the timing is just right."
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The project calls for the construction of three new buildings, and a retrofitting of an existing building to house the emergency hospitals, at a cost of about $10 million for each hospital. Each will have about 10 inpatient beds, and will be open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and staffed with board-certified emergency medicine physicians, registered nurses, radiation technologists, and other clinical specialists. The emergency rooms will be equipped like conventional, large hospital-based emergency departments, with on-site imaging services including X-ray, CT scan, and ultrasound, and in-house labs.
Emerus was started six years ago by six emergency physicians. It operates two emergency hospitals and three 24-hour emergency rooms in Texas. Hamilton says The Woodlands, TX-based company is now negotiating with other healthcare organizations to open additional emergency hospitals.
"Knowledge of the ER and its functionality is really hands-on," Hamilton says. "People can say they understand it but until you've lived in it for five or 10 years you don't understand how ERs work."
Hamilton says that once patients are triaged and registered at the Baptist emergency hospitals they will be seen by a physician within 15 minutes, and most patients will spend less than one hour in the facility. "The physicians and the staff are coordinated in a completely different level where we are cross training people and jobs aren't isolated in buckets," he says. "It's a SWAT team approach."
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Baptist will own the hospitals and provide the staff. Emerus will manage the hospitals. The project will create approximately 160 new jobs in the San Antonio area. Baptist expects to open its first hospital this fall, with the remaining three hospitals to open over the next year, the hospital system said.
"Our mission at Baptist Health System is to be an innovative leader in providing quality and accessible health care to the people of San Antonio in a way that best meets our patients' needs," Graham Reeve, president/CEO of Baptist Health System, said in a joint media release. "Minutes matter in an emergency situation and improving access to emergency medical care is crucial to the health and wellbeing of our growing communities. We believe that these free-standing emergency facilities will make a difference in people's lives."
For-profit Baptist Health System is owned by Vanguard Health System.
Hamilton says health systems are coming to recognize the flexibility and economy that smaller emergency hospitals provide.
WEBCAST: Transform Your ED into a Profit Center June 23, 1:00 -- 2:30 ETRegister today
"In my opinion, the days of building that $300 million, 50-story hospital are over," he says. "Most hospitals are starting to look at community hospitals more as fire stations. For example, in our buildings they will be co-equipped with primary care physicians, rotating specialists etc., and the community comes to view that facility as its way station before it goes over to the big hospitals. It's the nimble, quicker version where that community doesn't have to drive nearly as far, but has access to those same resources."
Two national reports on physician recruiting and compensation confirm some of what we've suspected, but also show how complex and variable the process has become depending upon location and specialty. As in politics, it seems all healthcare is local.
Ken Hertz, a principal with the Medical Group Management Association's Healthcare Consulting Group, tells HealthLeaders Media it's hard to pinpoint many trends because healthcare is in a state of flux.
"There is a lot of change going on, but we are in a period where we are in the middle and it will probably be a year or so before the dust settles and [we see] what it all means," Hertz said. "You have the movement towards hospital and system employment. You have some aggregation of practices going on, but not as much as one would think. You've got private practices trying to get competitive with hospitals. You've got shifts in population, shifts in the age of physicians, general population-to-physician ratios, and then all of the healthcare reforms and accountable care organizations, and people are concerned that the sky is falling."
Merritt Hawkins' 2011 Review of Physician Recruiting Incentives, for example, confirms that the demand for primary care physicians continues to be strong, and that more physicians are becoming employees. The Irving, TX-based physician recruiter tracked more than 2,660 physician recruiting assignments nationwide from April 1, 2010 to March 31, 2011. In that time, 56% of the physician search assignments featured jobs with hospitals, up from 23% five years ago. Only 2% of Merritt Hawkins' search assignments featured openings for independent, solo practitioners, down from 17% five years ago.
"The era of the independent physician who owns and runs his or her practice is fading," Travis Singleton, senior vice president of Merritt Hawkins, said in the report. "Doctors today are more likely to be employees working for increasingly large health systems or medical groups."
Beyond that, local variables kick in. A report from MGMA -- Physician Compensation and Production Survey: 2011 Report Based on 2010 Data -- finds that compensation growth for primary care and specialty care physicians was all over the board in 2010, and appeared to be determined as much by location as by area of medical expertise.
For example, median compensation for both primary care physicians and specialists was highest in southern states, with primary care physicians earning a median of $216,170, and specialists earning a median $404,000. By comparison, primary care physicians in eastern states earned a median $194,409, and specialists earned a median $305,575.
Hertz says that factors beyond cost of living and demand may explain regional compensation variations. "The Northeast is heavy into … I would hesitate to call it managed care, but certainly more structured PPO/negotiated plans. California has the foundation models, the huge groups, again the heavy negotiations. The South has an aging population, a lot of specialists, and gerontologists," Hertz explained.
Both Merritt Hawkins and MGMA found that some physicians can't necessarily bank on an increase in compensation every year. Five of the Top 20 recruited specialties in the Merritt Hawkins survey saw their average base salary decline between 2009/10 and 2010/11. Family practice base salary fell from $200,000 to $197,000. Neurology fell from a base of $281,000 to $256,000. Hematology/Oncology fell from $385,000 to $369,000. Radiology fell from $417,000 to $402,000, and endocrinology fell from $219,000 to $218,000, the survey showed.
MGMA found that orthopedic surgeons reported median compensation of $514,659 -- the highest median of and specialty in the survey -- up 3.7% from 2009, and 15.2% from 2006. However, urologists reported median compensation of $372,455, a drop of 4.66% from 2009, and up 4.15% from 2006, while radiology/diagnostic reported median compensation of $471,253, a drop of 1.6% compared to 2009, and up 5.5% from 2006.
"The cuts in imaging continue to impact cardiology, radiology, and urology, but the big trend toward hospital employment for cardiology probably kept them from seeing any big losses," Hertz says.
While it might be difficult to spot firm and fast trends in physician recruiting, Hertz says, healthcare organizations that are successful at physician recruiting do share some common characteristics.
"All too often the healthcare organization, to be an effective recruiter, thinks it's all tied up with money. For the new docs money is important. But work/life balance, quality of life, integrity, transparency, those are all important issues," Hertz pointed out. "The successful groups from a recruiting standpoint are those that embrace the latest social networking and embrace some of the Internet technology to surface candidates."
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said Friday that starting July 1, it will use new predictive modeling technology in a "real-time" fight against Medicare fraud.
The new predictive modeling technology, similar to that used by credit card companies, helps identify potentially fraudulent Medicare claims on a nationwide basis, and helps stop fraudulent claims before they are paid. The initiative builds on the new anti-fraud tools and resources provided by the Affordable Care Act that are helping move CMS beyond its former "pay & chase" recovery operations to an approach that focuses on preventing fraud and abuse before payment is made, CMS said.
"Today's announcement is bad news for criminals looking to take advantage of our seniors and defraud Medicare," CMS Administrator Donald Berwick, MD, said in a media release. "This new technology will help us better identify and prevent fraud and abuse before it happens and helps to ensure the solvency of the Medicare Trust Fund."
Original Medicare claims will be analyzed using innovative risk scoring technology that applies effective predictive models, an approach similar to that used by the private sector to successfully identify fraud. For the first time, CMS will have the ability to use real-time data to spot suspect claims and providers and take action to stop fraudulent payments before they are paid, CMS said.
Northrop Grumman was selected through a competitive procurement to develop CMS' national predictive model technology format using best practices of both public and private stakeholders. The contract is being implemented nationally and ahead of schedule.
Northrop Grumman will deploy algorithms and an analytical process that looks at CMS claims – by beneficiary, provider, service origin or other patterns — to identify potential problems and assign an "alert" and assign "risk scores" for those claims. These problem alerts will be further reviewed to allow CMS to both prioritize claims for additional review and assess the need for investigative or other enforcement actions, CMS said.
Pardee Hospital in Hendersonville, NC has entered into an affiliation agreement with the UNC Health Care System, becoming the second hospital in the Tar Heel State to affiliate with a major health system this month.
"Pardee is a well respected and exceptionally strong community provider that shares a similar mission with UNC Health Care," Gary L. Park, president of UNC Hospitals, said in a media release. "We look forward to joining Pardee in developing an even better healthcare system for the citizens of Henderson County and the region."
Also, the Pardee Hospital board of directors named James "Jay" Kirby II as president/CEO. Kirby most recently was senior vice-president/CAO of Self Regional Healthcare in Greenwood, SC.
Pardee Hospital is a not-for-profit community hospital that is licensed for 222 acute care beds and is the second largest employer in Henderson County. The hospital has several locations separate from the main campus, including an adult day services center, a health education center, home care services, rehab and wellness center, a midwifery program, various family and internal medicine practices, and an urgent care facility.
On June 6, Person Memorial Hospital in Roxboro, NC, announced that it plans to become the second hospital to affiliate with Duke LifePoint Healthcare, a joint venture of Duke University Health System, Inc. and LifePoint Hospitals. PMH's board of trustees approved a non-binding memorandum of understanding that allows the 110-bed, community owned hospital and Duke LifePoint to negotiate the acquisition, PMC said.
Duke LifePoint is a joint venture formed last year between Duke University Health System and LifePoint Hospitals to create a network of affiliated community hospitals throughout North Carolina. The venture combines Brentwood, TN-based LifePoint's operational resources and management of community-based hospitals with Duke's clinical and quality services expertise. If the deal is finalized, PMH will become the second hospital in the Duke LifePoint network. The first hospital, Maria Parham Medical Center in Henderson, NC, entered the affiliation in January.