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The revolving door of avoidable hospital re-admissions is slowing across the nation, including in Texas. The state posted a 5.8 percent decline in recent years, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reports. Nationally, the average decline was 8 percent between 2010 and 2015, with every state except Vermont reporting reductions, a CMS blog post said. In Vermont the increase was statistically negligible. (Deam, 9/14)

On Tuesday evening, the Marin Healthcare District Board took a step in that direction by voting to ask its staff to investigate clinical and legal issues related to patient use of the drug on-site. Medical marijuana is legal in the state, but hospitals haven’t yet allowed patients to use it. (Fine, 9/14)

A ceremonial groundbreaking Thursday will mark the start of a $43 million project to convert part of a parking garage into a new emergency department at University of Chicago Medicine, bringing back trauma services to the South Side after a 25-year absence. The new emergency department is expected to open in January 2018, and trauma services will likely be offered in early spring 2018. (Schencker, 9/15)

The bacteria that cause Legionnaires’ disease have been detected in part of the water supply at the University of Washington Medical Center, where officials said a second person linked to an outbreak has died. An ice machine and two sinks in cardiac units of the hospital’s Cascade Tower were found to be contaminated with the germs that can cause the potentially deadly form of pneumonia, officials said Wednesday. (Aleccia, 9/14)

Hospice patients are expected to die. The service, after all, is intended for the terminally ill. But over the past decade, as a 2014 Washington Post investigation found, the number of patients who outlived hospice care in the United States has risen dramatically, in part because hospice companies earn more by recruiting patients who aren’t actually dying. Now government inspectors have turned up information about how that happens. (Whoriskey, 9/14)

As many as 1.4 million seniors survive a stay in the ICU every year. And most go home, with varying degrees of disability. ICUs are responding to older patients’ needs by helping them try to regain functioning — something that families need to pay attention to as well. “There’s a growing recognition that preparing patients and families for recovery needs to start in the ICU,” said Dr. Meghan Brooks Lane-Fall, assistant professor of critical care at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. (Graham, 9/15)

The North Suburban Hospital District Board, which owns the Allina-run Unity Hospital in Fridley, (Minn.), voted Wednesday night to begin the process of dissolution. The unanimous vote was the result of months of discussion, beginning formally in the spring, when Allina announced its plan to turn Unity and its Coon Rapids-based Mercy Hospital into a single hospital with two campuses, according to the board’s attorney, Scott Lepak. (Cooney, 9/14)