Category Archives: Uncategorized
Cartoon – Your Compensation Basis
Forest Park shuts down Fort Worth hospital before Texas Health Resources takes over
Forest Park Medical Center Fort Worth was shut down late Tuesday and most of its employees laid off as Texas Health Resources wraps up its purchase of the bankrupt doctor-owned, luxury hospital on the city’s west side.
Justice Department accuses Ontario-based hospital chain of cheating Medicare system
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-prime-healthcare-20160525-snap-story.html
The U.S. Justice Department has joined a whistle-blower case against Prime Healthcare Services, adding significant weight to allegations of widespreadMedicare overbilling at 14 of the company’s hospitals in California. A Los Angeles magistrate judge granted the agency’s request to intervene in the case Tuesday, one day after the government declared in a court filing that its investigation of the Ontario- hospital operator has “yielded sufficient evidence” that the facilities “submitted or caused the submission of claims to Medicare for unnecessary inpatient stays.” Prime finds itself under federal scrutiny because of a whistle-blower complaint submitted in 2011 by Karin Berntsen, a registered nurse and director of quality and risk management at Alvarado Hospital in San Diego. Berntsen’s lawsuit accuses Prime of routinely making Medicare patients’ illnesses seem more severe than they really were in order to justify billing for additional services and increasing hospital admissions.
Another NYC Hospital to Disappear: Mount Sinai Beth Israel
Payer Consolidation Expected to Roll on Over Next Decade
Senior-level healthcare industry stakeholders believe that consolidation in the payer space is likely to continue over the next ten years—and not to the benefit of consumers.
Inventing a Machine That Spits Out Drugs in a Whole New Way
The Defense Department is funding a device that produces 1,000 pills in 24 hours and raises the possibility that hospitals and pharmacies could make their own pills as needed.
Cartoon – Adopting Best Practices
Fla. physician gets 25 years in prison for 3 overdose deaths
Trinity Health hospital to pay $107M to settle pension mismanagement lawsuit
The $107 million settlement is more than 13 times larger than the $8 million settlement reached by St. Louis-based Ascension Health and its workers in a similar suit in 2015. In their suit against Ascension, workers claimed the system’s pension plans were underfunded by more than $444.5 million. The St. Francis and Ascension Health cases are the only two public settlements that have been reached in the 30 class-action suits filed in the past three years accusing religiously affiliated hospitals of mismanaging their pensions, according to the report.
