Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
State Highlights: Prime Healthcare Wins N.J. Medical Center In Bankruptcy Auction; Allegiance Health Joins Detroit-Based Henry Ford Health System
The Saint Michael鈥檚 Medical Center, a 357-bed hospital in Newark, N.J., may become the latest facility to be taken over by California-based Prime Healthcare after it made a $62.2 million purchase offer. In court papers, Saint Michael鈥檚 Medical Center lawyers declared a Prime Healthcare affiliate to be the winner at Thursday鈥檚 bankruptcy auction for the hospital. (Stech, 11/10)
Allegiance Health in Jackson plans next year to join the much larger Detroit-based Henry Ford Health System. The two nonprofit health systems announced Tuesday a letter of intent for an affiliation arrangement that would make Henry Ford the parent organization. The merger is still subject to regulatory approvals but expected to finalize in the first quarter of 2016, officials said. (Reindl, 11/10)
About two dozen community hospitals in Kansas and Nebraska have signed up to use Cerner Corp.鈥檚 electronic health technology. The hospitals are members of the Great Plains Health Alliance, which provides management services to critical access hospitals in both states. Critical access hospitals focus on outpatient care and are limited to no more than 25 inpatient beds. Under federal Medicare guidelines, they are required to be at least 35 miles from any other hospital. (Margolies, 11/10)
Minneapolis-based Harken Health is launching in Atlanta and Chicago with some deep pockets behind it. Its main investor is health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group. Harken is opening six primary care centers in metro Atlanta, getting ready for its Jan. 1 start-up. The centers are located in Austell, Brookhaven, Decatur, Duluth, east Cobb County and Roswell. (Miller, 11/10)
A Maryland panel is holding a seminar on how to de-escalate confrontations with people experiencing a mental health crisis. The Maryland Police and Correctional Training Commissions is holding a session on Wednesday afternoon to demonstrate what works and what doesn鈥檛 in a mental health crisis that will include participants who will role play. (11/11)
Three men hunch over a table, scrutinizing a document. Maps paper the walls around them. The moment, captured in a black-and-white photograph, marks the beginning of a quest to catch a villain. For more than four decades, this team has been stalking the killer's every move, trying to identify patterns of attack. They collect and store evidence, filling drawers and file cabinets. The detectives: researchers at USC. The bad guy: cancer. (Karlamangla, 11/11)
Every Thursday night you can find Nathan Fields making the rounds of Baltimore's red light district, known to locals as The Block. An outreach worker with the Baltimore City Health Department, Fields, 55, is a welcome sight outside strip clubs like Circus, Club Harem and Jewel Box. In the early evening before the clubs get busy, he talks with dancers, bouncers and anyone else passing by about preventing drug overdoses and how to stop the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. Later on, he'll drop into the clubs to check on the dancers who aren't able to come outside, finding out what they might need. (Cornish, 11/10)
Maine's attorney general is suing a protester who she says yelled so loudly outside a Planned Parenthood facility that he disrupted health care services there. Attorney General Janet Mills filed a complaint under the state's civil rights act against 26-year-old Brian Ingalls, of Lisbon. She says he violated the rights of patients at the Portland facility Oct. 23 when the sound of his voice directed to the second floor disrupted counseling sessions between staff and patients. (11/10)
Maine's top attorney on Tuesday filed a civil rights lawsuit against an anti-abortion protester, contending that his yelling outside a Portland Planned Parenthood clinic was so loud that it disrupted the staff's ability to counsel patients inside. The lawsuit, filed in Maine's Superior Court by Attorney General Janet Mills, alleges that Brian Ingalls, 26, who shouts about "murdering babies, aborted babies' blood and Jesus," violated the state's Civil Rights Act because he was audible inside the facility. (11/10)
Los Angeles County supervisors agreed Tuesday to pay $1.3 million to settle a lawsuit brought by a patient who alleged she was groped and sexually harassed by a doctor at a county clinic. They also took county health officials to task and called on them to put in place stricter protocols requiring that medical examinations be chaperoned and policies be developed to encourage nurses and staff to report doctors suspected of misconduct. (Sewell, 11/10)
Federal agents arrested and indicted the owners and administrators of a Texas-based home-health agency on Tuesday for defrauding Medicare of around $13 million through billing for unnecessary or non-existent services, the U.S. Justice Department said on Tuesday. The agency owned by Ebong Tilong and Marie Neba allegedly devised a web of kickbacks where physicians authorized home-health services and patients in on the scheme received a share of the payments, the department said. (11/10)
