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With about five weeks to go before California Attorney General Kamala Harris must decide on a proposed deal between the struggling Daughters of Charity Health System and BlueMountain Capital Management, a consulting firm hired by the state is again recommending that approval be granted only if the hedge fund continues to operate most of the hospitals as acute-care medical facilities for at least a decade. (Seipel, 10/13)

Crozer-Keystone Health System has reached a preliminary deal to be acquired by Prospect Medical Holdings Inc., a for-profit firm that owns 13 hospitals in California, Texas, and Rhode Island, Crozer officials said Monday. Crozer, which owns five hospitals in Delaware County with about 600 beds, has struggled financially. It announced a year ago that it was exploring strategic options. (Brubaker, 10/13)

Two Broward County hospital districts are in a legal dispute about which one of them should be allowed to offer an adult kidney-transplant program, according to documents filed in the state Division of Administrative Hearings. The North Broward Hospital District, which is known as Broward Health, filed a legal challenge after the state Agency for Health Care Administration denied its application for what is known as a "certificate of need" to operate a kidney-transplant program. (10/13)

A settlement has been reached in the legal tug-of-war over the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute that pitted the Detroit Medical Center against Flint-based McLaren Health Care. The confidential settlement, announced Monday, concludes a 2013 lawsuit concerning a merger and marketing partnership between Karmanos and McLaren that DMC sought to scuttle. The merger was controversial because Karmanos had an exclusivity compact with DMC. However, Karmanos and McLaren claimed that DMC did not live up to its end of the agreement because it didn't attract enough cancer patients from Detroit's suburbs to treat at Karmanos. (Reindl, 10/12)