Hospital News Roundup for August 3
Children's Hospital Central California on Tuesday ended its contract with Blue Cross of California to treat children enrolled in Medi-Cal and Healthy Families, the Fresno Bee reports.
The hospital and Blue Cross since February have been negotiating a new contract. Hospital officials said the facility last year lost more than $11 million on its Blue Cross Medi-Cal and Healthy Families contract.
Micheline Golden, hospital spokesperson, said the two sides were unable to reach an agreement on reimbursement rates (St. John, Fresno Bee, 8/1).
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., has chosen Rady Children's Hospital as a long-distance site for conducting clinical trials for cancer therapies, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports.
St. Jude this year will spend $500,000 to operate a clinical trials office at Rady, which has a larger patient base than the Tennessee hospital. Under the partnership, trial participants will receive treatments at Rady but will be monitored by St. Jude under that hospital's protocols.
The clinical trials will test compounds for acute lymphoblastic leukemia, as well as compounds for fighting sickle-cell anemia, bone cancer and a form of brain cancer, William Evans, CEO and director of St. Jude, said (Clark, San Diego Union-Tribune, 7/28).
St. Rose Hospital is paying $8 million to build three medical office buildings near its campus as part of a larger effort to foster relationships with physicians and increase revenue from inpatient and outpatient care, the East Bay Business Times reports.
The hospital also plans to add 30 patient beds to its main hospital tower and spend $15 million in seismic retrofits on the tower to meet state safety standards.
Other plans include a joint venture with physicians on a new imaging center that would include a 64-slice computer-aided tomography scan and a PET scan (Hogarth, East Bay Business Times, 7/27).