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Regency Hospital of Fort Worth, Texas will permanently close its doors on August 11, leaving 152 employees at the specialty acute-care facility without jobs, according to Select Medical Corporation. The Mechanicsburg, Pa.-based company that operates more than 1,400 healthcare facilities in the U.S. announced the closure of RHC Fort Worth in a June 13 letter to the Texas Workforce Commission. (Rice, 6/20)

Are patients at Allina Health hospitals in the Twin Cities getting the care they need with 4,800 nurses on strike for a week, and 1,400 replacement nurses filling in? There seemed scant agreement on the issue Monday as the nurses’ union, the Minnesota Nurses Association, traded terse words with Allina officials about what is happening at the four hospitals. (Ojeda-Zapata, 6/20)

SSM Health will spend $550 million to build a new academic medical center to replace St. Louis University Hospital in south St. Louis. When SSM Health took over St. Louis University Hospital last year, plans to build a replacement were announced immediately by the network’s president and CEO, Bill Thompson. Thompson has since announced plans to retire next year. (Bouscaren, 6/20)

When the government invested $30 billion dollars to get hospitals and docs these electronic health records this was the dream. And now more than 96 percent of hospitals are digitized, nearly 80% of physician practices as well. ...One significant problem: vendors charging hospitals and docs to share patient data. (Gorenstein, 6/20)

At a public hearing this year, a nursing director from Boston Children’s Hospital made a painfully detailed case for why the hospital needs to expand. In the crowded neonatal intensive care unit, she said, doctors sometimes have to perform emergency surgery at an infant’s bedside, “within feet of other critically ill children and their anxious parents.” The open layout means that only a curtain separates a family preparing to take its baby home from parents who just took theirs off life support, she added, their sobbing heard by all. ... But what might seem an undeniable need for Boston Children’s — a new 11-story building that would house a bigger N.I.C.U. and heart surgery center, and private patient rooms instead of doubles — is instead bogged down in controversy. (Goodnough, 6/20)