After months of negotiations, union nurses and other hospital workers at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center will vote late next week on whether to authorize a strike. Contract negotiations have gone on for months and the unions are unhappy with Providences proposed changes to benefits and leave time Continue reading →

Englewood Health to merge into Hackensack Meridian Viorel Florescu, North Jersey Record Englewood Health, for 130 years an independent hospital serving eastern Bergen County, plans to merge into Hackensack Merdian Health, one of two large health systems that now dominate medical carein New Jersey. The merger agreement includes a commitment by Hackensack Meridian to invest $400 million in new operating rooms, expanded cardiac facilities and outpatient sites for Englewood physicians,executives of the two institutions announced Tuesday.Hackensack Meridian has also agreed to take on Englewood's outstanding debt of $182 million. Englewood Health president Warren Geller announcing that Englewood Health will merge into Hackensack Meridian Health(Photo: Viorel Florescu / NorthJersey.com) We realize that we can do many things together that we cannot do alone, Warren Geller, Englewood Healths president and CEO, wrote in a message Tuesday to staff, employees and volunteers of the hospital Continue reading →

October 15, 2019 -When Medicare reimbursement depended on location, greater hospital-based versus practice-based payments were associated with higher proportions of outpatient non-invasive cardiac tests performed in the more expensive setting, according to a new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine. The observational claims-based study of Medicare fee-for-service claims from 1999 to 2015 found that the hospital-based outpatient testing to provider-based office testing payment ratio for non-invasive cardiac tests, which include echocardiography and stress testing with or without imaging, increased from 1.05 to 2.32 from 2005 to 2015. Continue reading →

This story was originally published by ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom, in partnership with NJ Advance Media and WNYC. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. On a Thursday morning this past April, 61-year-old Darryl Young was lying unconscious in the eighth-floor intensive care unit of Newark Beth Israel Medical Center Continue reading →

In the midst of a soaring crisis over health care costs, the debt collection court in Coffeyville, Kansas is emblematic of a larger problem that's been getting national attention. Providers, like hospitals, are suing some of the sickest clients, who are losing everything they own because they needed care. Continue reading →