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Doctors are splitting, specialty by specialty, over whether and how to overhaul a secretive panel that helps determine how much Medicare pays them for their work. (Trang, 11/17)

Worries about care quality and antibiotic resistance are growing as a financial component is added to hospital compliance with federal requirements designed to reduce sepsis cases. ... Starting in January, hospitals will have to improve their compliance with the metrics to receive full points and avoid a penalty under the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program. (Devereaux, 11/16)

After a year of cost-cutting, CommonSpirit Health is looking to add ambulatory care capacity next year. The health system plans to add more facilities for ambulatory patients in the coming year, as care continues to move outside of the hospital, it said in financial documents released Wednesday. The nonprofit system recently added 19 imaging centers, seven ambulatory surgery centers and six primary and urgent care sites across multiple states, including California and Texas. (Hudson, 11/16)

Call 911 in this northwest Nebraska town, and the ambulance responding will likely be coming from South Dakota. If that crew isn’t available, the ambulance might drive from Valentine, Neb., 60 miles and a different time zone away. Or from Gordon, where the all-volunteer staff includes employees of a grocery store, bank, veterinary office and farmer’s co-op. “You’re looking at an hour or longer for a response,” said Rose Chappell, the last emergency medical technician in Merriman, which had to shut down its ambulance service. (Najmabadi, 11/16)

There is no place in this county to give birth short of an emergency. The only facility caring for adults, Madera Community Hospital, closed in January, leaving women in labor a 40-minute drive to the closest alternative in another county. Babies often cannot wait out the ride. More than 1,000 women had delivered babies each year at Madera Community. Over just a couple of weeks this fall, with it closed, a woman gave birth in a car on the shoulder of Avenue 9 in downtown Madera. (Wilson, 11/16)

If Yale New Haven Health’s proposed $435 million acquisition of three Connecticut hospitals owned by Prospect Medical Holdings gets state approval, most of the money will go to a company that most state legislators, local leaders and residents have never heard of: the hospitals’ landlord. (Golvala and Carlesso, 11/16)

The idea of mandating that hospitals meet minimum cybersecurity standards is gaining traction amid scrutiny of mounting attacks that have knocked health systems offline for weeks and upended patient care. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul this week proposed the state become the first to require health systems to adopt certain cyber defenses, including preparation of response plans for a potential attack. (Reed, 11/17)

As the toymaker behind the Barbie DreamHouse, Mattel knows a thing or two about grand designs. In 2017, the company pledged to bring one such vision to life with a $49 million gift to the University of California at Los Angeles’s health system to expand bed capacity through a new hospital tower. As part of the donation, UCLA agreed to integrate Mattel’s logo into all of its signage and publications. But the toy company never fulfilled its pledge, offering only a fraction of the cash, UCLA alleged last week in a new breach-of-contract lawsuit. (Rosenzweig-Ziff and Bellware, 11/16)