profit hospital

> Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt says 40,000 hospital rooms have been identified nationwide as available for Katrina victims; 1,000 beds are available in New Orleans. Story

> HCA evacuated Tulane Medical Center with apparently no federal government help or coordination. …

The nation's largest for-profit hospital chain, HCA, warned that second-quarter profits were going to be complicated by a series of accounting moves. The market has decided that means they'll be lower than expected and took note that HCA also stated that same-facility admissions were flat and the number of uninsured admissions rose 5 percent.

- see this story from TheStreet.com

The national non-profit hospital accreditation and standards group JCAHO said it has discovered a bug affecting software it distributes to hospitals. According to critics, the bug may cause hospitals to loose some quality control data. Thousands of hospitals around the country use the software to track their progress towards hundreds of different criteria used by the standards and accreditation group. JCAHO informed customers of the problem with a note posted on the organization's website …

Chuck Grassley is a fiercely independent Republican Senator from Iowa. Parochially he's interested in defending rural hospitals, but on the national scale he's one of the main voices pushing for reform of the FDA and to stop what he perceives as specialty hospitals "gaming" Medicare. Now he's gong a step further. As reported in FierceHealthcare on Thursday, Grassley is now …