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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Scott Becker - 10 Healthcare News Stories We Are Following Today 1-26-26
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This is Scott Becker with the Becker Healthcare podcast. These are 10 healthcare stories that we're following today. And thank you for listening to the Becker's Healthcare Podcast. I'd love your feedback on this podcast. Feel free at any time to text Scott Becker at 773-766-5322. Whether the content's helpful or the sound is okay. And quite frankly, if you're the first person to text 773-7664, 5322, we'll send you a $50 gift certificate for thanking us, for giving us comments on the sound quality and the content. Thank you so much for listening. So here are 10 stories that we're following today at Becker's Healthcare. First, oncology's bedrock remains the same. This is a story that comes out of a podcast that we did with Dr. Frederick Green. And Dr. Green is one of the key oncologists that was in the world of setting up the staging of cancer. So when you get cancer or someone in your family gets cancer, you learn about stages 1, 2, 3, 4, with 1 being the least scary and 4 being the scariest. And Dr. Green himself spent a lot of his career in the middle of developing these standards. It was remarkable to talk to Dr. Green. The podcast is at Becker's Healthcare. Again, Dr. Frederick Green. He's with the Levine Cancer center, which is part of the Advocate health system today. 2nd US hospitals brace for massive winter storms. That's again a story that we're following throughout the country this week. U.S. hospital storm for big storms. Brace for massive storms. Third, Cedar Sinai gets a $30 million gift for a specialized cancer center. Again, what we're again seeing in health care is more and more dollars moving towards big ticket areas like orthopedics, oncology and heart disease. It seems like everything new is getting built on a campus. It' often related to these three areas to one of these three areas. Fourth Common Spirit Health and talks to sell seven of their hospitals. Again, an effort by a major system to get their footprint right and to keep their total size in the right spot and be in markets where they could really be strong. Fifth Pennsylvania Hospital to reopen with operational discipline under new ownership. And again, this is the Crozier Chester Health center that had closed after being bought by a private equity fund. Now new investors come in and let's hope they can make this work. We'll see how it goes. Sixth, discussion about the $50 billion federal funds going to rural hospitals. Rural hospitals assert that they're not listening to any of the recommendations coming from rural hospitals and we'll see how this all plays out again. We'll see if it actually has any impact or positive impact on rural health care. Very tough nut to crack is essentially we need more doctors and nurses in rural areas and not enough doctors and nurses want move back to rural areas. Seventh, a discussion about how one hospital said a cap, a maximum cap of four to one nurse to patient ratios. And I love this, not because it's a sign of the reality of trying to staff things well with the right level of nursing help, the right level of PA help, the right level of everything help, but not being sort of chasing high staffing ratios when they don't necessarily make the difference. We all want to be well staffed enough, but this is basically signing up, putting a line in the sand that need to hit the right balance on staffing and not to sort of overstaff or hopefully understaff. Eighth, a story about community health systems. And this is similar to the discussion about Common Spirit Health. Community Health Systems has now shed 41 hospitals since 2020 in an effort to get much more, much leaner and get some of their debt paid down. Ninth, one of the huge growth stories over the last 10 to 20 years is Prime Health Care. They're in the process acquiring their ninth Illinois hospital. We cover that at Becker's Healthcare. Finally, 10th is an article by Kristen Kuchno which goes through the highest qual by different specialties. Neurosurgeons at the top of the quality list, but again a constant issue. Now we're also hearing more and more about smaller and larger surgery centers having to pay subsidies for anesthesia. I know a very different nature than qual, but again speaks to the same thing. Shortages of physicians requiring health systems to pay for qual and all kinds of surgical types of locations having to pay for anesthesia coverage. Again, these are 10 of the stories that we're following this week at Becker's Healthcare. Thank you so much for listening to the Becker's Healthcare Podcast. We'd love your feedback both on content and on sound quality. I also would love your feedback. My guess is I'm talking a little bit too quickly today. Would love to hear your feedback on all of that. If you're the first person to provide feedback to Scott Becker at 773-766-5322. We'd love to provide you an Amazon gift certificate for $50. Thank you for listening to the Becker's Healthcare Podcast.