Under the deal, Franciscan was financially accountable for what it would spend on care for about 60,000 patients who had Anthem benefits provided by its employers or purchased individually. Would it work?
It took $394,000 to rank in the top 1 percent of U.S. earners in 2013. And more than 100 of the Indiana contingent in that exclusive club were physicians employed by one of the four major hospital systems that operate in the Indianapolis area.
The individual hospital campuses around Indianapolis saw their collective revenue rise 8 percent and their collective operating profits rise 22 percent from from 2011 to 2013. That’s solid, just not stellar, growth.
In Indiana, Anthem has struck accountable care organization deals with 14 health care provider groups and signed up nearly 2,900 primary care providers to its medical home program. And it’s pushing for more in the future.
Franciscan Alliance has offered to take over Jasper County Hospital in exchange for accepting all of the hospital's liabilities and debt, according to the Rensselaer Republican. A proposed asset purchase agreement was discussed May 13 by a joint meeting of the hospital’s board of trustees, the Jasper County Commissioners and the Jasper County Council. The […]
Dr. James Callaghan will replace Bob Brody as CEO of Franciscan’s three hospitals in Carmel, Indianapolis and Mooresville. Brody will oversee all ambulatory centers and physician offices in the entire Franciscan health system.
In an effort to reduce Indiana’s shortage of psychiatrists, Community Health Network will establish a psychiatry residency program in 2016 to provide specialized training to recent medical school graduates. According to Community, 43 of Indiana’s 92 counties have no practicing psychiatrist. “Based on the state’s population, there should be 650 psychiatrists in Indiana, but in […]
Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield has signed a new kind of contract with the Franciscan Alliance hospital system that allows Franciscan to make more money only if it saves money for Anthem.
Encore Health Network, a network of health care providers owned by Community Health Network, Indiana University Health and Deaconess Health, has added St. Vincent Health to its fold. The Indianapolis-based network will offer discounted access to St. Vincent doctors and hospitals in the Anderson, Carmel, Fishers, Indianapolis and Kokomo markets. Insurance companies, third-party administrators and employers contract with Encore and its Encircle network products to obtain discounts on medical services.
Indiana University Health and UnitedHealthcare entered the new year without a contract. That would normally mean UnitedHealthcare’s customers would pay higher prices at IU Health’s hospitals and physician offices. But IU Health has decided to still give patients the same "in network" co-pays and deductibles that UnitedHealthcare had negotiated under the expiring contracts, keeping patients’ costs the same until a new deal is reached. IU Health said in a press release it would apply the "in network" discounts only to the patient portions of its bills, not to the portions paid by UnitedHealthcare. The Minnesota-based health insurer first notified its customers on Dec. 2 that its contracts with IU Health could expire at year end. Such contracts typically shave 30 percent or more off the list prices of a hospital system’s services. The contract dispute could affect the roughly 400,000 Hoosiers that have employer-based or individually purchased insurance with UnitedHealthcare. That represents about 12 percent of the Indiana commercial market, according to data from Tennessee-based market research firm HealthLeaders-InterStudy. IU Health operates 20 hospitals and employs nearly 1,500 physicians around Indiana.
The U.S. Supreme Court has temporarily blocked an Obamacare requirement that religiously affiliated employers provide health insurance that includes birth control. The decision gives temporarily relief to Catholic plaintiffs that said Obamacare’s requirement to provide contraception coverage violated their religious freedom. In a related case, Indiana-based Franciscan Alliance and other Catholic organizations won a temporary injunction from a federal judge in Indiana, to allow the Supreme Court challenge to play out before Franciscan would be required to provide contraception coverage to its workers via its health insurance plan. "We simply asked that the government not impose its values and policies on plaintiffs, in direct violation of our religious beliefs," said Kevin Leahy, CEO of Franciscan Alliance, which operates three hospitals in the Indianapolis area. The Affordable Care Act required all health insurers to cover contraception at no cost to its health plan members and required all employers with 50 or more workers to provide health insurance to their workers. Both provisions were set to take effect Jan. 1.
Franciscan Alliance, which operates three hospitals in the Indianapolis area, has signed an affiliation agreement with the University of Chicago Medicine that will affect its facilities in northwest Indiana. Both institutions said they plan to work together to develop new models for delivering health care services, such as accountable care organizations. Franciscan, based in Mishawaka, operates 13 hospitals in Indiana and Illinois. The partnership with the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine will involve the Franciscan facilities in Crown Point, Dyer, Hammond, Michigan City and Munster.
Indiana will not allow health insurers to reinstate customers’ policies that were canceled due to new requirements of Obamacare, the state Insurance Department announced Nov. 20, saying that would “create logistical chaos” and “destabilize” Indiana’s individual insurance market. The announcement, which affects an estimated 108,000 Hoosiers who have had their policies canceled, came in response to President Obama’s request Nov. 14 that state insurance commissioners let insurers reinstate policies that they had decided to cancel for 2014. Indiana is the eighth state that has announced it will not allow insurers to reinstate canceled policies. According to the Atlantic Information Services, another five states have said they have allowed insurers to do so. However, some Hoosiers still have the option of renewing their canceled policies for 2014, as long as they do so before Dec. 31. The state's ruling announced on Wednesday would apply to customers whose policies had been canceled, and who waited until 2014 to buy coverage for that year.
The Hoosier Healthcare Innovation Challenge helped launch three young health information technology companies. CreateIT won the entire competition by developing an application for sending educational articles, event alerts and baby updates to the mobile phones of low-income pregnant moms. The goal is to help reduce infant mortality, which has surged to high levels in Indiana. Other companies that received awards during the competition were DeDupIt, which created a way to merge electronic medical records about a patient into a single report; and MedDiary, which created a new system of care that tracks all medications, over the-counter and prescriptions, being taken by a single patient. Each company received cash prizes and free professional services.
Before this year’s cuts, Indiana hospitals had added 12,000 jobs over the past six years, even as private employers across Indiana, collectively, added no net new workers.
Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield President Rob Hillman expects a slow start to the Obamacare exchanges, with fewer than one-third of uninsured people buying coverage there.
Physicians employed by Indianapolis-area hospitals are likely to see their pay cut in the next few years unless the hospitals find new ways to be significantly more efficient.
While rural hospitals face sharp reductions in their operating incomes, most of the four major hospital systems based in Indianapolis will see only a marginal impact on their finances.
Paul Halverson has been appointed founding dean of the new Indiana University Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health at IUPUI. Halverson, 54, has served as director and state health officer for the Arkansas Department of Health since 2005. Prior to his work in Arkansas, Halverson held several positions at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Halverson earned a bachelor’s degree in communication and a master’s degree in health services administration from Arizona State University. He also earned a doctorate in public health from the University of North Carolina.
Jay Brehm has been appointed senior vice president of strategic planning and business development for Franciscan Alliance, a Mishawaka-based hospital system. Brehm currently is the chief financial officer at Franciscan St. Francis Health, which operates Franciscan’s three Indianapolis-area hospitals. Brehm holds a bachelor’s degree in accounting and an MBA from Ball State University.
Dr. Thomas Wisler has joined Franciscan Physician Network McFarland Gynecologic Specialists on the south side. Wisler received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Florida and a medical degree from Creighton University School of Medicine.
Titus Schleyer has been named to lead the Center for Biomedical Informatics at Indianapolis-based Regenstrief Institute. Schleyer is an associate professor of dental public health at the University of Pittsburgh and founding director of the Center for Dental Informatics in the School of Dental Medicine. Schleyer earned doctorates in dental medicine and molecular biology at the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany. He subsequently received a second dental degree and an MBA in health administration from Temple University in Philadelphia.
The Franciscan Alliance hospital system has signed a deal with Philadelphia-based health insurer Cigna Corp. to offer an accountable care plan to Cigna’s customers in the Indianapolis area. Mishawaka-based Franciscan will use the same accountable care organization it formed in 2011 to work with the federal Medicare program. That organization includes Franciscan hospitals in Carmel, Indianapolis and Mooresville, as well as 600 physicians in central Indiana. Franciscan and Cigna will rely heavily on case managers, who will help patients, especially those with chronic diseases, navigate the health system. The case managers will use Cigna data to identify patients in need of such attention and will in some cases refer patients to Cigna’s health management and wellness programs.
Warsaw-based DePuy Orthopaedics Inc. kept selling an artificial hip implant even after the doctors it paid as consultants on the product had begun abandoning it and after the product had failed an internal test, according to internal company documents disclosed in a legal case and summarized by The New York Times. DePuy, a subsidiary of New Jersey-based Johnson & Johnson, recalled the troubled hip implant, called the Articular Surface Replacement, or ASR, in 2010. The company has been the target of 10,000 lawsuits filed by patients who had to receive a second hip implant after the ASR failed. The device has been prone to shedding large amounts of metallic debris inside patients. DePuy’s own internal estimates show they expected the ASR to fail in 40 percent of patients within five years of their hip-implant surgery.
Greenwood-based Elona Biotechnologies Inc., which has been trying to bring a generic version of insulin to market, is running out of cash and struggling to find new investors. The company told Greenwood officials of its financial troubles earlier this month, which prompted the Greenwood Redevelopment Commission to vote Jan. 17 to declare Elona in default on $8.4 million of economic development incentives the city gave the company in 2010. Wendy Brewer, an attorney for the Greenwood Redevelopment Commission, said one potential investor in Elona wants the company’s exposure under the incentive programs altered as a condition of investing in Elona. “We’re continuing to talk to them,” Brewer said, adding that the company’s finances dictate that a decision be made in a couple of weeks. Greenwood loaned $6.4 million to help Elona build a 50,000-square-foot, $28 million insulin-production plant in Greenwood and hire 70 workers. The city also gave Elona $1.5 million to help it win approval for its insulin from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and $500,000 for equipment. So far, Brewer said, Elona has made no progress on its jobs commitments. Elona, founded by a former Eli Lilly and Co. scientist, has made its business doing contract drug manufacturing for other firms. But its growth plans hinged on making a generic version of insulin, something that was not allowed in the United States until the 2010 passage of the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act. That law called for a pathway for “biosimilar” versions of biotech drugs, including insulin. As it stands now, a drug such as Lilly’s Humulin insulin faces no generic competition even though its patent expired in 2001. Nearly a year ago, the FDA issued draft guidance on “biosimilar” drugs that indicated it would require additional clinical trials of a biosimilar drug. That means a company like Elona would have to spend significant money to test its drug in patients before the FDA would declare it similar to an existing insulin. Calls to Elona founders Ron and Donna Zimmerman were not returned Tuesday morning.
WellPoint Inc. ended the year on a high note, posting fourth-quarter sales and profit that exceeded Wall Street’s expectations. The Indianapolis-based health insurer earned $464 million, or $1.51 per share, in the three months ended Dec. 31, a 38-percent leap from the same quarter a year earlier. Excluding investment gains and one-time charges, WellPoint would have earned $1.03 per share. On that basis, analysts were expecting 95 cents per share. Membership in WellPoint’s health plans shot up nearly 8 percent in the fourth quarter to more than 36 million nationwide. That represented a net gain of more than 2.6 million customers. The increase was entirely attributable to WellPoint’s $4.9 billion acquisition of Virginia-based Amerigroup Corp., which added 2.7 million members in Medicaid plans. But the Blue Cross Blue Shield insurer on Wednesday gave analysts a conservative forecast for 2013, due in part to a daunting list of expenses it could face. WellPoint will spend roughly $300 million this year preparing for coverage expansions under the health care overhaul coverage and changes to its Medicare Advantage business. The insurer also expects to spend as much as $125 million integrating Amerigroup into its business, and it says it could take hits from flu claims, possible cuts to Medicare funding and an increase in health care use. Counting those expenses, WellPoint expects to earn at least $7.60 per share in 2013 compared to the $8.18 per share it earned last year.
St. Vincent Health will add air medical service at Rush Memorial Hospital in Rushville. The new StatFlight helicopter base, scheduled to open in late April or early May, will be St. Vincent's fourth helicopter base in Indiana. The others are located in Anderson, Danville, North Vernon and West Lafayette. St. Vincent contracts with PHI Air Medical LLC to operate its StatFlight air medical service.
The Community Health Network hospital system has created a new partnership with Indianapolis-based Lutheran Child and Family Services to provide treatment for children who have experienced trauma and are dealing with behavioral challenges. Indianapolis-based Community will help Lutheran manage the behavioral health services for children and adolescents at Lutherwood, a youth residential treatment facility, and Trinity House, a transitional group home for young men. The collaboration also will include community-based programs previously managed separately under Indianapolis-based Gallahue Community Mental Health Center and Lutheran. Lutheran will continue to offer spiritual care programs of its own for children and their families. Community serves more than 25,000 behavioral health patients each year. Its behavioral health unit employs more than 600 physicians, psychologists, advance practice nurses, psychiatric nurses, therapists, counselors, life skills specialists and care managers.
Diagnotes LLC, an Indianapolis-based developer of health care software, won the inaugural Hoosier Healthcare Innovation Challenge held by the economic development group Develop Indy. Diagnotes and two other finalists, CreateIT and Freedom Solutions, presented product demonstrations at the annual conference of the Indiana Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society. Diagnotes’ On Call software, which delivers patient medical records to smartphones of an on-call doctor, won $5,000 for taking first place. Diagnotes also won the business competition that was part of the Indiana Life Sciences Summit, staged by Indianapolis-based BioCrossroads, in October.
In a bid to compete for cancer patients with Indiana University Health and St. Vincent Health, Community Health Network will make its North and East hospitals affiliates of the University of Texas’ MD Anderson Cancer Center. MD Anderson, one of the best-known treatment centers for cancer, will certify the cancer physicians at the two hospitals and give Community access to the evidence-based treatment and follow-up plans developed by MD Anderson. “This is a game changer for our network,” Bryan Mills, CEO of Indianapolis-based Community Health Network, said in a prepared statement. “Professionals in the medical field know the MD Anderson name very well, as it’s the gold standard for cancer care.” Community also plans to seek MD Anderson Cancer Network certification at its hospitals in Anderson, Kokomo and on the south side of Indianapolis.
Advantage Health Solutions Inc. suffered a security breach that potentially affects members of the Franciscan Alliance accountable care organization. The breach occurred Oct. 19 when a subcontractor of Indianapolis-based Advantage mailed generic health questionnaires to 2,575 beneficiaries with individual identification numbers inadvertently displayed. No personal health or financial information was disclosed. Advantage, which provides care management and data services for the Franciscan ACO, said it is offering free credit monitoring to all members of the health plan.
West Lafayette-based Tymora Analytical Operations LLC received $300,000 from the National Institutes of Health to help it develop technology to help researchers develop drugs to treat cancer and diabetes, as well as immune and neurological disorders. The company’s technology, called PolyMAC, is based on research by Andy Tao, a Purdue University professor of biochemistry. Tymora received a $150,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health this year, and has also received a $150,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. All the grants are part of the federal government's Small Business Innovation Research, or SBIR, program.
Indianapolis-based WellPoint Inc.’s $4.9 billion acquisition of Virginia-based Amerigroup Corp. is expected to be approved Oct. 23 after Amerigroup officials agreed to delay a shareholder vote for two weeks to resolve investors’ claims they were being shortchanged in the deal, according to Bloomberg News and Dow Jones Newswires. Amerigroup officials said they would consider new offers to buy the company, but with shareholder advisory groups Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. and Glass Lewis & Co. both endorsing the deal, new offers are not expected to materialize. The acquisition, announced July 9, would make WellPoint–already the second-largest U.S. health insurer–the largest private provider of Medicaid plans for low-income patients. Amerigroup helps states manage health coverage for the poor. Some investors sued Amerigroup’s board in August alleging directors, along with financial adviser Goldman Sachs Group Inc., put their own interests ahead of shareholders by backing the WellPoint offer when there was a second suitor that had expressed interest.
WellPoint Inc.’s National Government Services unit will add more than 100 jobs in Indianapolis beginning late this year or early in 2013 after the health insurance giant won a new contract with the federal Medicare program. The contract, awarded in late September, makes WellPoint’s NGS unit the administrator for hospital and physician bills racked up by 2.7 million seniors on Medicare in Illinois, Minnesota and Wisconsin. It also puts NGS in charge of home health and hospice bills for Medicare recipients in 13 states and five U.S. territories. If NGS keeps the contract for its maximum five-year term, the deal will bring in an estimated $318 million in revenue and account for roughly 20 percent of all NGS revenue. In May, WellPoint was forced to lay off 112 local workers after it lost a separate Medicare contract for Indiana and Michigan. WellPoint officials said a “large majority” of those employees will be asked back to work on the new contract. The new contract will add 200 to 300 workers to NGS, with half or more of those jobs being added in Indianapolis. The balance of the new positions will be added at an NGS office in Milwaukee. NGS now employs 2,000 people, including about 500 in Indianapolis. Winning the contract also helps NGS hold on to some workers that it might have had to let go. All told, more than 450 NGS employees will work on the new contract. Those employees will do claims processing, information technology support, and audit and reimbursement reviews of Medicare bills. NGS also will hire nurses to conduct medical reviews of claims.
Indianapolis-based Dow AgroSciences LLC acquired the assets of California-based Cal/West Seeds, which supplies alfalfa, clover and other crops to seed companies and growers in the United States, Canada and 25 other countries around the world. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed. “Cal/West fits our business model–they are not only a technology developer in their industry, but also have a strong genetics program which will strengthen our forages business,” said Rolando Meninato, the global leader of Dow Agro’s seeds, traits and oils business. The Cal/West acquisition will complement another alfalfa company Dow AgroSciences acquired in 2008, called Dairyland Seed, and will give Dow Agro one of the largest forages businesses in the industry. Dow Agro is a subsidiary of Michigan-based Dow Chemical Co.
Indiana Wesleyan University’s School of Health Sciences, which is under construction in Marion, will add graduate degree programs in physical therapy, occupational therapy, athletic training and public health. "Many professionals engaged in the health professions may desire to earn graduate or advanced degrees while entry-level positions now require graduate degrees," said Larry Lindsay, founding dean of the School of Health Sciences. "We are responding to the future needs of those students in the health professions. Thus we seek to become a major Christian provider of health and human services at the local, state, national and global level." A new building to house the school is expected to be ready to open in fall 2014. In 2010, Indiana Wesleyan lost out to Marian University as the site of a new medical school in Indiana. Indiana Wesleyan is an evangelical Christian university of The Wesleyan Church, founded in 1920. It enrolls more than 3,000 students on its campus in Marion and more than 12,000 at satellite education centers in Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and over the Internet.
The Franciscan Alliance hospital system has absorbed Medical Specialists, a 55-physician practice in northwest Indiana. The group of primary care providers and specialists is now called Franciscan Medical Specialists, and provides care in such fields as endocrinology, OB-GYN, orthopedics, pulmonary medicine and rheumatology. It has offices in Munster, Dyer, Hammond, Hobart, La Porte, Merrillville, Michigan City, Schererville and Valparaiso. Franciscan Alliance, which is headquartered in Mishawaka, operates 13 hospitals in Indiana and Illinois, including three in the Indianapolis area.
Franciscan Alliance, the hospital system based in Mishawaka, has established Franciscan Physician Network to unite the system’s growing number of employed doctors under one name. Franciscan Physician Network has more than 750 physicians at 260 practice locations. The rebranding changes the name of Franciscan’s 200 employed doctors in central Indiana, who went by the name St. Francis Medical Group. Franciscan Alliance operates three hospitals in central Indiana—in Indianapolis, Mooresville and now a short-stay hospital in Carmel. Other groups that are also part of the Franciscan Physician Network include Sigma Medical Group in West Central Indiana, the Woman’s Clinic, Lafayette OB/GYN and Premier Healthcare for Women in Lafayette, Athens Medical Group in Crawfordsville, and HealthPartners Medical Group, Medical Associates and Hammond Clinic in Northern Indiana.
An Indiana University study has found that what people studied in college had a direct effect on their chances of employment during the Great Recession. According to the Associated Press, people with degrees in health, education and biology/life sciences had the best chance of getting and holding a job from 2009 to 2010. Only one out of every 44 graduates in those fields found themselves unemployed, according to data analyzed by the Indiana Business Research Center at IU's Kelley School of Business. By contrast, one out of every 13 people with degrees in architecture, industrial arts, consumer services and engineering suffered unemployment in 2009 and 2010. The study used data from the Indiana Workforce Intelligence System to examine the employment history of 178,000 people living in Indiana who graduated from state public colleges and universities.
The Cancer Care Group in Indianapolis said a laptop computer bag containing private information on as many as 55,000 patients has been stolen. The bag was stolen from a Cancer Care Group employee's locked vehicle on July 19, the physician group said in a prepared statement. The Cancer Care Group, headquartered at 6100 W. 96th St., is one of the largest radiation oncology private physician practices in the country, with more than 20 oncologists. The bag also contained similar information about the group’s employees. The group said the bag has not been recovered, but there has been no evidence to suggest the information has been used. Patients and employees have been notified of the theft.
Family Physicians of Carmel, a three-doctor practice, has joined St. Vincent Medical Group. The new physicians joining St. Vincent are Dr. Daniel Crabb, Dr. Rhys Jones and Dr. Stephen Lang. Crabb and Lang earned their medical degrees from the Indiana University School of Medicine. Jones earned a degree from the University of Western Ontario Medical School of London in Ontario, Canada.
Indiana University Health, as well as a partnership of Franciscan Alliance and American Health Network, have formed accountable care organizations that won the blessing of the federal Medicare Shared Savings program.
