June, 2014

Customer feedback is great for telling you what you did wrong. It's terrible at telling you what you should do next."—Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote

1. Schuyler Hospital Unveils 7.6M Renovation, Expansion

2. Mercy Health Builds $50M Virtual Care Center

3. Phoenix Children's Hospital, Dignity Health to Open Pediatric Inpatient Unit

4. Danbury Hospital Unveils $150M Addition

5. St. Charles Health System Plans $22M Renovation at Bend Hospital

6. Cleveland Clinic to Open $20M Satellite ED

7. Kaleida Health to Start Building $270M Children's Hospital

8. Unity Hospital Unveils $180M Expansion, Modernization

9. Jackson Health System Unveils $1.4B Expansion, Renovation

10. Advocate Eureka Hospital Plans $13M Expansion

11. Florida Hospital DeLand Begins $3.5M Addition

12. Fairview Park Hospital to Nearly Double ER Size

13. White Plains Hospital to Build $20M Medical Office Building for Expanded Cancer Care

14. Garrett County Memorial Hospital Begins $23.5M Construction Project

15. Box Butte General Hospital Funds $40M Expansion, Renovation Project

16. Fletcher Allen Health Care Unveils $51M Expansion Plan

Parkview agreement was the 21st monetary settlement reached between the OCR and healthcare provider organizations, drugstore chains and health plans over HIPAA violations since 2008. Coupled with one imposition of a monetary penalty, these enforcement activities have yielded payments exceeding $25.9 million.

Resolute Health Hospital is Tenet’s 79^th hospital and its 19^th in Texas. Last month, Tenet announced plans with Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center to build a new teaching hospital in El Paso, due to open in late 2016. And earlier this month, Tenet completed the acquisition of Texas Regional Medical Center, a 70-bed hospital in Sunnyvale, Texas.

Rite Aid is the third largest drugstore retailer in terms of number of stores after Walgreen and CVS. Rite Aid’s sustained focus on enhancing pharmacy and clinical services through the recently initiated Rite Aid Health Alliance or its Wellness+ customer loyalty program, along with the remodeling of its wellness stores bode well for future growth.

Information compiled by data brokers from public records and credit card transactions can reveal where a person shops, the food they buy, and whether they smoke. The largest hospital chain in the Carolinas is plugging data for 2 million people into algorithms designed to identify high-risk patients, while Pennsylvania's biggest system uses household and demographic data.

The new Beaumont system will account for about 30% of the Detroit market, based on hospital inpatient and outpatient services, where it competes with Henry Ford, Detroit Medical Center and St. John Providence Health System. “On a geographical analysis, these three organizations are very compatible and help create a much more comprehensive geographic coverage for the region.”

Philips and Salesforce.com have just partnered to deliver healthcare IT service in the cloud. What does this mean for the hundreds of medical device manufacturer's that in essence now trust a competitor with their most important and sensitive date: their customers and prospects? Good move by Philips - perhaps not so smart for Salesforce.com

Adding digital breast tomosynthesis to mammography screening boosts the detection of invasive cancer by more than a third compared to mammography alone while reducing the number of false positives by 15%, according to a study in the June 25 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Larger organizations have greater market power to demand higher prices from those plans for doctor visits and hospital stays. And higher prices paid by plans translate into higher premiums for consumers.