Walmart Health Expanding In Florida With 5 New Locations

Modern Healthcare: 5 Things To Know About Walmart Health's Florida Expansion
Walmart Health will open five new locations in Florida, as the retailer continues to scale its "one-stop-shop" vision for healthcare offerings. Walmart is opening two clinics in Jacksonville, two in Orlando and one in Tampa in the coming months, the company said Tuesday. The retail giant represents a growing number of non-traditional healthcare providers that seek to provide a more convenient and affordable experience through a mix of virtual and in-person care. (Kacik, 4/5)

In other health care industry news —

DCist: Several Hundred Howard University Hospital Workers Plan To Strike
The labor union for over 300 nurses, pharmacists, dietitians, and social workers at Howard University Hospital and the Student Health Center has announced plans to strike later this month. The union, District of Columbia Nurses Association, accuses hospital management of various unfair labor practices, including unilaterally changing some workers’ schedules and pay during negotiations, and walking away from the bargaining table. Howard University, meanwhile, says management has bargained in good faith but is unable to reach an agreement. (Gomez, 4/4)

Wyoming Public Radio: Campbell County Health Officials Say Their Healthcare System Could Become Bankrupt In A Few Years 
Campbell County Health (CCH) officials said that unless decisive actions are taken to improve the system’s financial state, current financial projections indicate the healthcare system could be insolvent by 2026. The announcement comes as CCH recently hired Matthew Shahan as their new CEO, replacing interim CEO Jerry Klein, who subsequently served in the position after the CCH Board of Trustees fired former CEO Colleen Heeter in October. Many hospitals and healthcare systems are continuing to deal with the effects the COVID-19 pandemic has wrought, especially in rural areas. (Cook, 4/4)

Stat: Hospital Prices Are Soaring Fast In Northern California. Here’s Why
California’s lawmakers have spent decades crafting well-intentioned rules designed to keep the state’s health care prices in check. But a new report shows that, clearly, something backfired. The Golden State dominates a new list of U.S. regions that saw the highest growth in hospital prices paid by private insurers in recent years. Out of 19 such regions, 11 were in California, according to a Health Affairs study released Monday. “We end up with this situation where the most regulated state has the highest prices,” said Ge Bai, professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “This is the exact opposite of what regulators had intended to achieve.” (Bannow, 4/4)

AP: Surgeries Delayed Because Of Flooded Operating Rooms In VT 
Dozens of surgeries were postponed Monday at Vermont’s largest hospital because of weekend flooding caused by a burst pipe. A dozen of UVM Medical Center’s 22 operating rooms remained out of commission on Monday, forcing nearly 50 surgeries to be delayed, the hospital said in a statement. (4/4)

KHN: Tech Glitches At One VA Site Raise Concerns About A Nationwide Rollout
Spokane, Washington, was supposed to be the center of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ tech reinvention, the first site in the agency’s decade-long project to change its medical records software. But one morning in early March, the latest system malfunction made some clinicians snap. At Spokane’s Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center, the records system — developed by Cerner Corp., based in North Kansas City, Missouri — went down. Staffers, inside the hospital and its outpatient facilities, were back to relying on pen and paper. Computerized schedules were inaccessible. Physicians couldn’t enter new orders or change patients’ medications. (Tahir, 4/5)

Also —

AP: Hennepin Healthcare: Choose. Doctor Or Police Officer? 
Hennepin Healthcare has a new policy which prohibits its doctors from working side jobs in law enforcement. The health care system’s leaders say it will end its contract for medical instruction with Minneapolis police as part of an ideological evolution. Hennepin Healthcare CEO Jennifer DeCubellis said the policy change comes from a need to draw “really clear lines” as to the hospital’s fundamental mission. (4/4)

Stat: Siobhan Wescott Wants To Elevate Native American Voices In Public Health
As the first endowed professor and director of American Indian health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s College of Public Health, Siobhan Wescott wears many hats and, often, a pale yellow flower behind her ear. She was raised by a single mother, herself an academic, in a small cabin in Fairbanks, Alaska. But throughout her career, Wescott has found herself navigating prestigious, predominantly white institutions far different from her rural upbringing. As an Alaskan Athabaskan, she has often been the only Native American or American Indian person in the room — though these labels, overly broad and imposed by the government, are misnomers she is trying to fix. (Cueto, 4/5)

Stat: A Dire Text Message Made This Doctor’s Cancer Research Painfully Real
If you’d seen him, you wouldn’t have known Scott Lippman was living through one of the most harrowing days of his 35-year career. The veteran oncologist, who directs UC San Diego’s Moores Cancer Center, had been invited to a San Diego life science conference in late February packed with academics, venture capitalists, and biotech bigwigs. As Lippman calmly clicked through slides describing his research on head and neck cancer, few knew he’d arrived exhausted from the emergency room, where he’d been caring for a patient with the same type of cancer he was now talking about. And no one noticed when his phone buzzed with a jarring message: His patient, James Ault, was being transferred to Lippman’s house. (Wosen, 4/5)

KHN: Why Nurses Are Raging And Quitting After The RaDonda Vaught Verdict 
Emma Moore felt cornered. At a community health clinic in Portland, Oregon, the 29-year-old nurse practitioner said she felt overwhelmed and undertrained. Coronavirus patients flooded the clinic for two years, and Moore struggled to keep up. Then the stakes became clear. On March 25, about 2,400 miles away in a Tennessee courtroom, former nurse RaDonda Vaught was convicted of two felonies and facing eight years in prison for a fatal medication mistake. (Kelman and Norman, 4/5)