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Blue Shield of California will lay off 165 workers by Jan. 31. The nonprofit insurance company will shed employees across six counties, with the largest number of cuts coming from its office in Oakland, California, according to Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification documents the insurer filed with the state Employment Development Department Friday. (Tepper, 1/2)

BJC HealthCare of St. Louis and Saint Luke’s Health System of Kansas City have officially completed their cross-market deal to merge into a single integrated, academic nonprofit health system. The Missouri organizations’ arrangement brought Saint Luke’s under BJC’s organizational umbrella on Jan. 1. Though the two are maintaining responsibility for their original markets and branding, the new partners said they now operate as a single healthcare organization of 24 hospitals and 44,000 employees. (Muoio, 1/2)

On a chilly morning last month, Darrin Smith, the president and CEO of Pueblo’s Parkview Health System, stood outside the 100-year-old system’s flagship hospital and gazed upon a bundled-up crowd. “This is a wow moment,” he said. “This is a wow moment for Parkview and for the citizens of southern Colorado. ”The occasion was to announce that Parkview would no longer be an independent health care system. (Ingold, 1/3)

West Reading, Pa.-based Tower Health has turned down a $706 million offer from StoneBridge Healthcare, a hospital turnaround firm, making this the fourth purchase offer rejected by the system since 2021. StoneBridge received an email from Andrew Turnbull, a managing director at Houlihan Lokey, an investment bank that works with Tower Health, saying that there had been a board meeting and the firm's offer had been rejected, Joshua Nemzoff, CEO of StoneBridge Healthcare, told Becker's. ... "Given their cash position and given their extraordinary amount of debt, I think our plan is just to frankly to wait for them to go bankrupt and show up in court for the auction. I think that's going to happen next year," Mr. Nemzoff said. (Ashley, 1/2)

Senior living and skilled nursing home operator The Ensign Group kicked off 2024 with the acquisition of two skilled nursing facilities in Tennessee and Nevada. The company, one of the nation’s largest independent operators of skilled nursing and senior living facilities, said Monday it acquired TriState Health and Rehabilitation Center, a 116-bed skilled nursing facility in Harrogate, Tennessee, for an undisclosed amount. (Eastabrook, 1/2)

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has vowed to protect New Yorkers from medical debt, limit hospitals' ability to sue patients and expand financial assistance programs as part of her 2024 State of the State. Ms. Hochul aims to introduce legislation that would curb hospitals' ability to sue patients earning less than 400% of the federal poverty level ($120,000 for a family of four). (Condon, 1/2)

Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott and Pivotal Ventures, a company founded by Melinda French Gates, have donated a combined $23 million to School-Based Health Alliance. The national, non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C., works to set up and expand healthcare service centers in schools that primarily serve students from low-income families. With the $16 million grant from Pivotal Ventures, SBHA will launch care coordination initiatives in Houston, Atlanta, Chicago and Miami. (Elliott, 1/2)

Hospitals and clinics are expecting a slightly better 2024 compared to last year thanks to a return to mostly in-person care, patients resuming preventive visits and the gradual easing of labor costs and shortages. Still, the evaporation of pandemic-related emergency funding will deal a blow to resource-strained health systems, and leaders say they’ll ramp up tech investments, including in artificial intelligence-based tools. (Ravindranath, 1/3)

Researchers found ChatGPT incorrectly diagnosed over 8 in 10 selected pediatric case studies, raising questions about some bots' suitability for helping doctors size up complex conditions. (Bettelheim, 1/3)