Tag Archives: Hospital

Ex-CFO: Sonoma West Medical Center benefactor said ‘cook the books’

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http://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/5929800-181/ex-cfo-sonoma-west-medical-center?utm_campaign=CHL%3A+Daily+Edition&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=32551462&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9clPt83wEDUurMMpqyDM1dyAp7deut55DqYuzz1P4pNgxjkcuDVhbiSnVGG5xFKGPT-_yQSR7_csUpx_FO377us5sVdQ&_hsmi=32551462

The former chief financial officer at Sonoma West Medical Center said a key hospital benefactor asked him to “falsely portray” the hospital’s finances to show positive net profit for the hospital, according to a whistleblower lawsuit filed this week.

The lawsuit against Sonoma West Medical Center was filed Monday by Douglas Goldfarb, who served as chief financial officer from Nov. 30, 2015 to June 6, 2016. It is the latest legal complaint against the embattled hospital, one that echoes charges made in a lawsuit filed two months ago by the hospital’s former chief nursing officer, Cheri AnDra.

As Sonoma West Medical Center officials said with AnDra’s lawsuit, they could not comment on the legal challenge because it involved personnel matters. Both Goldfarb and AnDra are represented by the same Bay Area attorney, Daniel Bartley.

The suits allege millionaire west county software entrepreneur Dan Smith, the hospital’s largest donor and most consistent financial supporter, is using the hospital as a testing ground for his “defective” tablet-based electronic medical records system called HarmoniMD.

As Hospital Chains Grow, So Do Their Prices For Care

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http://www.healthleadersmedia.com/finance/hospital-chains-grow-so-do-their-prices-care

As health care consolidation accelerates nationwide, a new study shows that hospital prices in two of California’s largest health systems were 25 percent higher than at other hospitals around the state.

Saving Lives And Saving Money

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http://www.healthleadersmedia.com/finance/saving-lives-and-saving-money

As health care costs continue to rise, attention has turned to a tiny number of super-utilizers. A program that started in California has taken a different approach to treating these high-cost patients: Over the past two years, it has tracked them, healed them and saved a ton of money.

For Hospitals, Prestige Leads To Profits

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http://www.healthleadersmedia.com/finance/hospitals-prestige-leads-profits

Market Power

Many of the hospitals best-positioned to earn profits are non-profits. They are the largest hospitals, and the ones with the most prestige.

More Than Half Of Hospitals To Be Penalized For Excess Readmissions

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The number of hospitals being penalized will be around the same as last year. But Medicare said the penalties are expected to total $528 million, about $108 million more than last year, because of changes in how readmissions are measured.

Tenet Healthcare agrees to plead guilty in Atlanta kickback scheme, will pay $514 million

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http://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2016/08/01/tenet-healthcare-agrees-to-plead-guilty-in-atlanta.html

Atlanta Medical Center, previously one of Tenet Healthcare’s Georgia hospitals, was involved in the scheme.

Tenet Healthcare Corp. (NYSE: THC) said Monday that it believes it has reached an agreement in principle with the government to resolve a long-running criminal investigation and civil litigation about a kick-back scandal involving an Atlanta medical clinic and three of the company’s Atlanta-area hospitals.

Dallas-based Tenet said it has agreed to pay $514 million, has agreed to the appointment by the U.S. Department of Justice of a corporate monitor for a period of three years, and has agreed for two wholly owned subsidiaries that previously operated Atlanta Medical Center and North Fulton Hospital to each plead guilty to a single-count indictment. The settlement will be with the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices for the Northern and Middle Districts of Georgia, and the Georgia Attorney General’s Office.

Atlanta Medical Center, previously one of Tenet Healthcare’s Georgia hospitals, was involved in the scheme.

Tenet Healthcare Corp. (NYSE: THC) said Monday that it believes it has reached an agreement in principle with the government to resolve a long-running criminal investigation and civil litigation about a kick-back scandal involving an Atlanta medical clinic and three of the company’s Atlanta-area hospitals.

Dallas-based Tenet said it has agreed to pay $514 million, has agreed to the appointment by the U.S. Department of Justice of a corporate monitor for a period of three years, and has agreed for two wholly owned subsidiaries that previously operated Atlanta Medical Center and North Fulton Hospital to each plead guilty to a single-count indictment. The settlement will be with the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices for the Northern and Middle Districts of Georgia, and the Georgia Attorney General’s Office.

“The agreement in principle contemplates, among other things, payment by the company of $513,788,345, which is comprised of a civil monetary payment of $368,000,000 and a criminal monetary payment of $145,788,345,” Tenet reported Monday.

The company’s two subsidiaries will plead guilty to a single count of conspiracy to violate the federal anti-kickback statute and defraud the United States, Tenet reported.

Hospital Chain’s CEO Faces Lawsuit Over Business Practices

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http://www.wsj.com/articles/hospital-chains-ceo-faces-lawsuit-over-business-practices-1470021573

Prem Reddy, head of Prime Healthcare, is known for his aggressive turnaround strategies.

Hedge fund-backed Bay Area health system sees C-suite shake up

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http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2016/08/02/hedge-fund-healthcare-verity-health-system-c-suite.html

Less than eight months after becoming CEO of Verity Health System, the successor to the former Daughters of Charity Health System, Mitchell Creem, has been demoted to chief administrative officer. Verity also hired a new COO, B. Joseph Badalian, it disclosed today.

The Redwood City-based system’s board of directors replaced Creem as CEO late last week with Andrei Soran, who was initially hired in April as president and COO.

Verity disclosed the “restructuring of the system’s executive team” on July 28. Board chairman Jack Krouskup said the new CEO “will continue to lead the efforts to revitalize our Verity hospitals to ensure that they continue to serve our communities across California for generations to come.”

Badalian, most recently CEO at Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and Medical Center in Southern California, a for-profit Tenet Healthcare Corp. (NYSE: THC) hospital, is set to start in the new job Sept. 1.

Why revamp the leadership team less than eight months in? “A turnaround is all hands on deck,” Soran told the Business Times late last week. “It’s a major effort, a fairly major turnaround.”

5 reasons to take hospital ratings with a big grain of salt

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5 reasons to take hospital ratings with a big grain of salt

It’s hospital ratings season in America, that time of year when marketing executives kick it into high gear to trumpet — and spin — the way their hospitals are graded by outside organizations.

This year, their workload has been especially heavy. In addition to annual rankings released Tuesday by U.S. News & World Report, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) just released its star-rating system for hospitals nationwide. While the ratings offer some valuable information to consumers, here’s why you shouldn’t put too much stock in the results.

No matter how objective the metrics, ratings are inherently subjective

The federal government and private organizations use a vast array of hospital data to break down their performance and boil it into easy-to-understand ratings for consumers. U.S. News & World report formulates its rankings by relying on a mix of physician surveys and data reported to trade groups and the federal government. CMS ratings are based solely on data hospitals are required to report to the agency.

The information itself may be objective, but which data points are used — and how they are weighted — can lead to contradictory conclusions. Consider the following:

Of US News & World Report’s’ top five hospitals,  only one  — Mayo Clinic — received a top, five-star rating from CMS. The rest — Cleveland Clinic, Massachusetts General Hospital, UCLA Medical Center, and Johns Hopkins — were not even in CMS’ top 100. (Johns Hopkins did not receive a rating from CMS because of incomplete data).

J.B. Silvers, a professor of health care finance at Case Western Reserve University, said the information, while boiled down into simple lists and stars, can be difficult for consumers to unpack, especially when hospitals are working behind the scenes to figure out ways to better their scores every year. “Some hospitals are better at working the numbers than others,” he said. “My guess is the safety net hospitals aren’t as good at it as richer hospitals.”

 

Boeing Contracts Directly With California Health System For Employee Benefits

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Los Angeles, United States - March 9, 2015: Boeing manufactuing facility. Boeing manufactures and sells aircraft, rotorcraft, rockets and satellites. It is the second-largest defense contractor in the world.

In another sign of growing frustration with rising health costs, aerospace giant Boeing Co. has agreed to contract directly for employee benefits with a major health system in Southern California, bypassing the conventional insurance model.

The move, announced Tuesday, marks the expansion of Boeing’s direct-contracting approach, which it has already implemented in recent years in Seattle, St. Louis and Charleston, S.C.

Other large employers are also pursuing this idea in regions where they have big concentrations of workers. In some cases, they refer employees to nationally top-performing hospitals for select surgeries.

MemorialCare Health System said Chicago-based Boeing selected it from a group of bidders for the five-year contract in Southern California, where the company has roughly 37,000 employees and dependents. Financial terms weren’t disclosed.

“More employers are interested in moving in this direction,” said Barry Arbuckle, chief executive of the MemorialCare Health System, based in Fountain Valley, California. “It reflects the desire of these employers to participate in bending the cost curve for health care, and it allows the provider to have a more unfettered relationship with the employer and employees.”