The board of directors at Mercy Hospital in Miami has voted to sell the 473-bed acute-care facility to Hospital Corporation of America. Financial terms for the sale of Miami-Dade County's only Catholic hospital were not disclosed.
"This is a wonderful opportunity to allow Mercy to be part of a larger presence in South Florida, while the mission of service to our patients continues," said Manuel P. Anton, III, MD, president/CEO of Mercy Hospital, in a joint statement today with HCA announcing the sale.
"Although Mercy now will be part of HCA, it will continue to operate in a manner consistent with the designation as a Catholic hospital, such that the Archbishop of Miami will be able to endorse it as a Catholic Hospital, adhering to the principles of faith with which it has served the community since its founding. Our top priority as always is the care of patients. This will be a seamless process for patients, their families, our associates and physicians." Anton said.
Mercy Hospital has served the Miami and Coral Gables area for nearly 60 years.
Michael G. Joseph, HCA East Florida Division President, said the acquisition of Mercy Hospital would complement the hospital chain's existing presence in South Florida. "With facilities in Aventura and Kendall, the addition of Mercy in Miami creates a corridor of care that enables us to better serve the community," Joseph said. "We have long admired Mercy's proud history of quality, compassionate care, and look forward to welcoming it into the HCA network of hospitals."
Mercy Hospital will retain its name and will continue to serve as a Catholic acute care hospital, owned and operated by HCA. The deal is expected to close as soon as possible.
Nashville-based HCA operates more than 160 hospitals, including 12 hospitals in its East Florida Division, and more than 100 surgery centers in 20 states and the United Kingdom. Established in 1950, Mercy is staffed by more than 700 physicians representing 27 medical specialties. Its Centers of Excellence include: The Heart Center at Mercy Hospital, the Miami Cancer Center at Mercy Hospital, the Orthopedic Institute at Mercy Hospital, and the Minimally Invasive Surgical Institute at Mercy Hospital.
Primary care physicians saw a 2.8% increase in their median compensation in 2009, according to a Medical Group Management Association study released today.
The Physician Compensation and Production Survey: 2010 Report Based on 2009 Data found that while most specialists continued to receive higher overall compensation than their primary care counterparts, some specialists reported flat or falling compensation.
"Despite a convergence of economic factors, employers' and payers' increased commitment to preserve the ability of primary care physicians to do their important work has allowed their compensation to keep pace with inflation," said William F. Jessee, MD, president and CEO of MGMA. "However, the continued threat of cuts to Medicare payments and its impact on private insurance reimbursement to all physicians impedes practices' ability to deliver quality care to an ever-expanding patient population."
OB/GYN, invasive cardiology, and hematology/oncology were among the specialties that reported flat or declining incomes. Physicians in OB/GYN posted a 1.1% decline in total median compensation in 2009, while invasive cardiologists posted a 0.2% decrease. Physicians in hematology/oncology—who have experienced declining revenues in their practices as a result of reduced reimbursement for administering drugs—reported that their compensation has increased 2.2% since 2005.
In marked contrast, dermatologists posted the largest compensation gains, a 12.2% median increase. MGMA attributed the steady compensation gains of dermatologists over the last several years to their elective procedures not covered by insurance and for which dermatologists can collect the full fee at the time of service. An increase in demand for dermatology services may also have driven up their compensation. Ophthalmologists reported a 7.7% increase in 2009 as laser refractive surgery and other non-covered services became increasingly popular.
MGMA's Physician Compensation and Production Survey Report provides data on nearly 60,000 physicians and non-physician providers in more than 110 specialties.
UCSF Children's Hospital has been given $100 million to help fund the construction of its new home at the UCSF Mission Bay campus near downtown San Francisco, the hospital announced today.
The gift is a private donation from Marc Benioff, founder, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, a San Francisco-based sales and customer services applications provider. It is the largest gift ever granted to the UCSF Children's Hospital.
With the gift, the hospital is being renamed UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital. The new name will apply to the hospital at UCSF's Parnassus Heights campus and to the future UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital at Mission Bay, part of a 289-bed integrated hospital complex for children, women, and cancer patients. Construction of the new hospital begins this year.
"In business, we say that people overestimate what you can do in a year and underestimate what you can do in a decade. This is true in philanthropy as well," Marc Benioff said. "We will give exclusively to UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital, which has the research base for the next generation of discoveries, a commitment to advance health worldwide, and a focus on every child, regardless of resources. This is where we believe our time and resources will make the most impact in the next decade and beyond."
The $100 million gift is one of the largest private donations ever made to a children's hospital in the United States and is the fourth largest philanthropic gift in UCSF's history.
"The Benioffs' extraordinary generosity will have a direct impact on the many thousands of young patients cared for at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital each year," said Mark Laret, CEO of UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital. "UCSF and the Benioffs share a commitment to performing at the very highest level, and we look forward to realizing our joint vision of creating the world's most advanced children's hospital at Mission Bay."
The gift completes the $125 million matching gift to the Campaign for UCSF Medical Center made in March 2009 by The Atlantic Philanthropies and its founder Charles F. Feeney. The match comes in two years ahead of schedule and brings the total raised for the $600 million capital campaign to $320 million.
UCSF is also launching an interactive website that will invite visitors to help shape the future of the new Mission Bay hospital. The UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Ideas site will offer an open forum for submitting suggestions about the new facility, including innovations in care and patient amenities.
When it is completed in 2014, the 183-bed UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital at Mission Bay will offer urgent/emergency care, pediatric primary care and specialty outpatient services; and, with 45 more beds than the existing hospital and an on-site helipad.
The proximity of the hospital site to UCSF's 42.5-acre biomedical research campus will speed the application of laboratory discoveries to the treatment of pediatric patients in the Bay Area and beyond, Laret said.
The Mission Bay children's hospital has been designed specifically for children and their families. Innovative equipment, child-friendly décor, and rooms and resources that engage the whole family will be large enough to enable parents to stay with their children around the clock. The new hospital will also have thousands of square feet of rehabilitation, play therapy, and outdoor garden areas.
The entire hospital complex also has been sustainably designed and will be certified LEED Gold by the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.
Physicians who want to communicate more easily with their patients—but aren't ready to open up an IT business in their back office—are turning to online solutions. Physicians at hospitals and private practices are using Web-based programs for a variety of tasks, such as conducting e-visits, e-prescribing medications, delivering lab results to patients, and sharing medical records with patients and their other providers—with no wiring, servers, or IT staff required. And, in some regions, healthcare organizations are partnering with their biggest rivals to make it happen.
That's the case in New Jersey, where several disparate hospitals that all use their own EMR systems are collaborating to help physicians and patients communicate more effectively.
The hospitals, all within a 20-mile radius in Middlesex County, agreed to use RelayHealth, a Web-based communication service produced by Alpharetta, GA–based McKesson. Some of the hospitals in the New Jersey Health Connect health information exchange and more than 700 affiliated doctors are already using the product, with more to follow.
It's a historic collaboration, says Frank DiSanzo, CIO at Saint Peter's University Hospital, a 478staffed bed acute care teaching hospital in New Brunswick, NJ, which plans to roll out the system to 100 of its doctors this month.
"Sharing information between these different hospitals in the area is really something that we've wanted to do for a long time, [but] we really haven't had a vendor-agnostic way to do it," says DiSanzo. RelayHealth offers doctors secure peer-to-peer and provider-patient communication and medical data sharing, plus other online tools such as virtual office visits and e-prescribing.
In the past, for a collaborative project such as this to work, hospitals had to agree to buy the same product, DiSanzo says. "And those things always started to fall apart relative to support and technology and who paid for what and how that would mesh with other proprietary technology these institutions had," he says. "So Relay, being vendor-agnostic, was an olive branch we could offer."
The main benefit driving adoption is the ability to better connect with patients in a competitive marketplace. It's easy to learn and has zero footprint, DiSanzo says. "You log on the web and, poof, you're there. No one's putting a server under your desk or asking you to back anything up," he says.
Still, some providers prefer to host their data on-site. "I counsel against that, and I think a lot of them may not know what they're getting themselves into," DiSanzo says. "I would recommend that physicians, as far as deploying EHRs in their practice, go with a Web-based software as a service model no matter what or who they ultimately purchase from."
The main reason is that IT is not most physicians' area of expertise. "You know, when you have a server there, who's going to maintain it? Are the environmental conditions proper? Who's going to do your backups? And what happens when that breaks? And who's going to restore your data? And on and on and on," DiSanzo says. "They're not used to running a little IT department. And when you look at how long they're responsible for the data they collect? That's why I would just say they're all better off adopting some kind of Internet-based software-as-service model."
On the other side of the country, in another fiercely competitive market, a similar partnership is under way. "We're reaching out to our archrivals," says Eric Saff, CIO and senior vice president of John Muir Health, a two-hospital system in Walnut Creek, CA. Saff says he never imagined that he'd be sitting at a table with his competitors, agreeing to help patients connect with physicians and to share information. "It's uncharted territory," he says.
One thing that's luring providers into that territory is that hospitals and health systems that facilitate patient access to medical records will comply with meaningful use requirements outlined in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and its Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) provision and qualify for stimulus money.
But it's not just about the money. "There's just this awesome ability to collaborate," Saff says.
At the root of why organizations come to the same table is the patient—giving them the ability to control and access their data and to improve quality and patient safety. The community has healthcare organizations that run about 20 different EMR systems that don't talk to each other, Saff says. And pertinent medical information can be lost or overlooked when patients seek care from multiple providers. Using RelayHealth to communicate and share information facilitates physician-hospital and patient-doctor communication, collaboration, and partnerships, Saff says.
In Kansas City, MO, the Web-based program is helping Saint Luke's Health System focus on physician alignment, says Deborah Gash, vice president and CIO of the 11hospital system. Doctors have access to lab results in near real time and they can access EMRs from their home or office. The ability to communicate with patients about nonurgent matters in a private and secure online format saves time and means fewer encounters and less time playing telephone tag. "It's a way to make it easier for them to practice with us," says Gash.
Physicians throughout West Michigan are using another Web-based platform that integrates clinical information with the EMR at physicians' offices. The program sends real-time laboratory, radiology, and transcribed results directly to the physician's EMR or to an electronic "dropbox" in his or her office. The eSHare Results solution is deployed jointly by Spectrum Health, a seven-hospital system in Grand Rapids, MI, and Medicity, Inc., in Salt Lake City.
More than 75 physician offices across eight counties in Michigan now receive data electronically from Spectrum Health, and an additional 70 offices are in the process of being connected. Physician practices and other hospitals can also submit electronic lab orders directly to the health system and perform other clinical recordkeeping tasks. For offices still using paper charts, Spectrum also supplies a bridge solution that allows them to begin interacting electronically.
It's an efficient method, says Patrick O'Hare, senior vice president and CIO of Spectrum Health. "We have been able to provide this information electronically, which helps our physician community become more efficient and, more important, improves patient care because the information can be accessed throughout a patient's life," O'Hare says.
Patient education is also important. "Fundamentally, it's information regarding them. It is information they should have access to," says O'Hare. Healthcare should make patients' information available "in the most relevant setting, in this case via the web, so they can be more engaged [and] take more responsibility for their health."
And that's a big selling point for physicians: that it engages patients and improves patient satisfaction, Gash says.
"There are very few pieces of patient software that get both patients and their families engaged," says Saff, and that works across facilities.
"It really is about the right thing for the patient," DiSanzo adds.
Select Medical Holdings Corp. announced today that it will acquire Alpharetta, GA-based Regency Hospital Co. LLC, the operators of 23 long-term acute care hospitals in nine states, in a deal valued at $210 million.
Mechanicsburg, PA-based Select Medical now operates 89 long-term acute care hospitals and six acute medical rehabilitation hospitals in 25 states, and 959 outpatient rehabilitation clinics in 36 states and the District of Columbia. When the acquisition is finalized this summer, Select Medical's operations will include 112 long-term acute care hospitals in 28 states.
Regency's net revenue in 2009 was $374.9 million, with net income of $6.1 million, Select Medical said in a media release.
Just a few years ago, the healthcare sector lagged behind the rest of the economy on healthy workplace issues such as smoking cessation and weight-loss counseling.
Not any more.
An impressive number of hospitals and healthcare sector businesses–including Baptist Health South Florida, Mayo Clinic, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, CIGNA, Aetna, and Quest Diagnostics–have joined other prestigious Fortune 500 companies such as PepsiCo. Inc, General Mills, and H.J. Heinz Co. on the National Business Group on Health's list of 2010 Best Employers for Healthy Lifestyles.
In fact, 25 of the 66 entities that made the list's Platinum, Gold, or Silver status are in some way linked to healthcare, including seven hospitals or health systems and seven health insurers. If actions speak louder than words, it's almost a Greek chorus.
"Healthcare organizations want to walk the talk, and they should," says LuAnn Heinen, a vice president at NBGH, who has overseen the awards program since its beginnings in 2005.
"What is truly exciting this year is the creativity and innovation that so many employers are bringing to their wellness and health management programs," she says. "We're seeing new and improved engagement strategies matched to a company or worksite culture, increased attention to corporate policy supporting healthy lifestyles, and stronger alignment of benefit design and incentives with health improvement targets. Important trends include family and community involvement, improved metrics to assess program performance, and efforts to engage less accessible or decentralized employees."
Heinen says that successful wellness programs all share one common thread: "a real belief that this needs to permeate the entire organization."
"The culture of health is becoming a bit of a buzzword. But companies that really get this understand that this is not a wellness manager in his or her office down the hall. 'This is something we are putting our brand on.'" Heinen says. "'We have C-suite leadership and grassroots. We have a lot of use of health advocates to reach out to work sites. We want this more and more—making a meeting with the wellness coordinator at the time of hire. This is who we are. Health works here.' That whole kind of mentality is permeating. That is the big change."
Beth Rohlfing, director of benefits and compliance at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia–which earned NBGH Gold this year for its two-year-old wellness program–says wellness programs will have to demonstrate a return on investment if they hope to endure and proliferate.
"That is key in our strategy this year: how we can demonstrate to senior leadership our ROI," Rohlfing says. "We are trying to look at our budget process a little differently so we are looking at how much we are investing in wellness programs as a percentage of total medical expenditures. If you look at it that way, we aren't investing as much as we should be. Capturing the ROI is critical. It's the missing piece for us right now, and we are trying to figure out what the metric should be."
Much of the wellness movement makes sense intuitively. Coax employees to lose weight or quit smoking and logically, a corresponding reduction will occur in the cost of providing healthcare coverage along with a reduction in productivity loss. After all, healthy employees use fewer sick days. So far, however, no definitive long-term data suggest these programs work. As anyone who has every tried to quit smoking or lose weight or change other decades of bad habits will tell you, there's a lot of backsliding.
Nonetheless, it's encouraging to see that many leading companies–particularly so many health insurance companies—are sticking with wellness programs even without definitive data suggesting they work. Some forward-thinking companies–understanding that most employees spend two-thirds of their day away from work–are extending the wellness benefits to employees' immediate families. Great idea! Once again, while a lack of empirical data exists to show the ROI for such an expansion of benefits, it makes sense intuitively that if the entire family is committed to wellness, success more likely will occur.
The next few years will prove to be pivotal for the wellness movement. Within a decade, we should have enough long-term data compiled to show what works and what doesn't, and what kind of ROI wellness can generate. Until then, we'll see a lot of experimentation, with different companies from across the overall economy adopting a range of wellness strategies tailored for their particular workforce. It should be interesting.
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Broward Health and Florida International University's Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine today signed an affiliation agreement that will provide clinical training for students from the new Miami-based medical college.
Broward Health is among the 10 largest public healthcare systems in the country, with five hospitals, an outpatient healthcare complex, and more than 30 facilities of the Community Health Services and Broward Health Physician Group.
The College of Medicine was approved in 2006 by the Florida Board of Governors and the Florida Legislature. In 2008, it received preliminary accreditation and admitted its first class of 43 students in August 2009, who were chosen from 3,332 applicants.
The medical college features a program called NeighborhoodHELP, which will send medical students along with their counterparts in social work, nursing, and public health, into the community. John Rock, MD, founding dean of the medical college, said the Broward Health pact will increase the reach of FIU's community-based medical education.
"Our medical school's mission is to serve the South Florida community and we are proud to partner with Broward Health to augment opportunities for our students," Rock said. "Our affiliation with Broward Health will help us accomplish our mission to increase the number of post-graduate programs in the state. This will be crucial in improving access to healthcare and quality of care in our community and will help us mold compassionate doctors who will stay and practice in South Florida."
FIU medical students will receive clinical training from Broward Health in several subspecialties, including general surgery, obstetrics and gynecology, and internal medicine.
"Medical education at all levels is an important part of the long-term strategic vision at Broward Health," said Frank Nask, president/CEO of Broward Health. "The FIU affiliation further solidifies Broward Health's commitment to training healthcare professionals and our future doctors for South Florida. We are proud of this relationship as we are with all of our educational affiliations."
FIU's other clinical partners include Jackson Health Systems, Mount Sinai Medical Center, Miami Children's Hospital, Mercy Hospital, Leon Medical Centers, Baptist Health South Florida, and Memorial Healthcare System.
Scripps Coastal Medical Center is expanding its primary care presence in San Diego County (CA) again with the acquisition of Del Mar Medical Clinic in a deal that will be finalized by Sept. 1, Scripps announced today.
Del Mar Medical Clinic, a five-physician practice that specializes in family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics, will be the 10th Scripps Coastal location in the county, with a network that will include more than 100 physicians and offices.
The Del Mar Medical Clinic physicians—most of whom are already practicing at both Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla and Scripps Memorial Hospital Encinitas—and 16 employees at the clinic will become employees of Scripps Health.
"As we move to a new era in medicine with healthcare reform, it is more important than ever to work closely with our primary care physicians to meet their practice needs and support the work of our specialty physicians," said Kevin Hirsch, MD, president of Scripps Coastal Medical Group. "In their commitment to provide the best care for their patients, the physicians of Del Mar Medical Clinic will now have access to the entire Scripps Health network to provide optimum care for their patients."
The U.S. Senate reached an 11th hour deal today and unanimously agreed to extend a $6.4 billion temporary "doc fix" deadline for 21% cuts in Medicare by another six months.
However, the cuts still go into effect today because the U.S. House won't act on the measure until at least Monday.
CMS today instructed Medicare contractors to lift a temporary hold on claims and services paid since June 1 and begin to process the claims with the 21% reimbursement cuts.
"The CMS is hopeful that Congressional action will be taken to avert the negative update and will continue to monitor those actions. If Congress changes the negative update currently in effect, CMS is prepared to act expeditiously to make the appropriate changes to Medicare claims processing systems," CMS said in a prepared statement.
The Senate action did little to assuage critics of Congress, particularly the American Medical Association, which has long called for a permanent fix.
"It is astounding that Congress has let seniors down through their inability to deal with this problem on time and in a responsible fashion," said AMA President Cecil B. Wilson, MD. "This afternoon, the Senate voted to delay the cut another six months, but the cut is still in place until the U.S. House of Representatives acts."
A Republican filibuster on the vote was cleared after Senate Democrats agreed with a GOP demand that the extension would not add to the federal budget deficit. "The fully-paid-for bill that we passed today would stop doctors from taking a 21% pay cut and ensure Nevada's seniors and veterans won't lose access to medical care they depend on," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV. "This is good news for millions, but we still have much work ahead of us to make sure that we are helping working Americans during these difficult economic times."
Wilson was less enthusiastic, and accused Congress of "playing Russian roulette with seniors' healthcare."
"Congress has finally taken its game of brinksmanship too far, as the steep 21% cut is now in effect and physicians will be forced to make difficult practice changes to keep their practice doors open," he says. "This is no way to run a major health coverage program - already the instability caused by repeated short-term delays is taking its toll."
Wilson says one in five physicians report that they've already been forced to limit the number of Medicare patients, including nearly one-third of primary care physicians.
"The top two reasons physicians gave for these actions were the ongoing threat of future cuts and the fact that Medicare payment rates were already too low," Wilson says.
New York Hospital Queens on Thursday opened its seven-floor West Wing with a ceremonial ribbon cutting at the Flushing main campus.
The 190,000-square-foot wing will add 80 beds to the hospital, and raises to 519 the hospital's certified bed capacity. The wing and a three-level parking garage took more than three years to complete at a cost of $210 million.
NYHQ President/CEO Stephen S. Mills said the wing was completed despite a deep recession and great uncertainty in the healthcare sector.
"Right here in Queens we saw several institutions close while our expansion project was underway," Mills said in a media release.
The wing includes medical/surgical units with private and semi-private rooms, and centralizes high-demand cardiovascular and orthopedic services. The ground floor includes an ambulatory surgery center with 10 operating rooms and 33 recovery beds.
The wing increases the hospital's capacity to perform surgical and interventional procedures with a hybrid operating suite for endovascular and interventional radiology procedures that can be converted to perform vascular procedures.
The lobby welcomes visitors with messages in the languages used most in the diverse neighborhoods of Queens County.
The wing was designed with the structural capacity to support additional floors, and as the project proceeded, two floors were added to the original plan. They will remain vacant space for the near future.
New York Hospital Queens is a member of the New York-Presbyterian Healthcare System and an affiliate of the Weill Medical College of Cornell University. Primary funding for the project came through the Department of Housing and Urban Development.