scandal

More Tenet troubles: Mina Nazaryan, a former exec at Tenet's Alvarado Medical Center who was charged with conspiracy last year, was sentenced to three years' probation and received a $27,000 fine. The sentence is her reward for the part she played in a scheme to give doctors kickbacks in the form of relocation bonuses. Nazaryan could have faced up to 27 months but her sentence was …

Tenet Healthcare will pay $725 million to resolve outstanding charges that it improperly billed Medicare and violated other federal rules governing hospitals. As part of the settlement, the hospital chain will be required to sell hospitals in Philadelphia, New Orleans and Florida. The charges, which date back to 2002, involve allegations that the company gamed the Medicare outlier payment system to win undeserved payments from the government. The settlement follows last month's news of …

The recent progress made in Washington on the eHealth front is encouraging, Judy Foreman argues in The Boston Globe. But unless steps are taken to address growing privacy concerns among the general public, the drive for electronic medical records is unlikely to go anywhere. The reality is that incidents like the recent scandal at the VA have made patient medical records privacy a hot issue that isn't likely to go away. Article

LifePoint will no longer be buying a troubled West Virginia Hospital as part of a five-facility deal with HCA. The chain had hoped to unload Putnam General Hospital in Hurricane, West Virgina, which faces epic legal problems as a result of a series of unnecessary and botched operations preformed by Dr. John Anderson King in 2002 and 2003. The hospital's potential liability in hundreds of malpractice cases filed in the wake of the scandal had been considered a serious obstacle to the deal. …

Should information technology have been able to prevent the problems at Kaiser Permanente's kidney transplant center? In theory, the answer is an obvious "yes." The transfer of thousands of patients from one program to another looks like a straightforward opportunity for electronic medical records (EMRs), an area where Kaiser is a leader. So what happened? The San Francisco Business Times looks at the scandal, examining the role of IT and also that of the Permanente Medical …

BrandWeek has a long and detailed investigative piece looking into Peter Rost's role in the scandal over off-label sales of the human growth hormone Genotropin at Pharmacia. The article looks at the involvement of Pharmacia head Fred Hassan, who now has the top job at Schering-Plough. Article

The problems at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey appear to be continuing. The troubled medical school and health system, which has been the focus of repeated reports of financial and political wrongdoing over the past year, has another scandal on its hands. Investigators say the school may have overbilled Medicaid by as much as $50 million to $70 million over the last decade. The crisis follows on the heels of a recent billing scandal in which UMDNJ admitted to …

As FierceHealthcare told you on Friday, this weekend's 60 Minutes featured the ongoing scandal of the uninsured being billed hospital chargemaster rates for care, when Medicare and private plans often pay one-fourth as much. There wasn't anything new in the story other than suggestions that for all the news and lawsuits about the issue in the past 18 months, it's apparently still going on--at least enough that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) continues to threaten legislation. Article

Convicted serial killer Charles Cullen was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of 22 patients in his care. The former nurse is believed to have killed as many as 40 patients while working at hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, using lethal injections of the heart medication digoxin to kill his victims.

Despite growing evidence of his crimes, Cullen was able to move from hospital to hospital for years, as higher ups chose not to take action for fear of creating a …

Despite a distracting conflict of interest scandal involving Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) and losses during the Gulf storms, HCA posted fourth-quarter numbers that were about the same as last year's. Despite all the problems, the company's stock is trading at about $50, up more than 25 percent over a year ago.

- see this article from the …