Home » Westview Hospital

Westview Hospital

Articles

Company news

Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly and Co. and Germany-based Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH got good news from their Phase 3 trial of a new drug for patients with Type 2 diabetes, and said they plan to file for its market approval later this year. The drug, called empagliflozin, lowered diabetics’ levels of hemoglobin—a measure of blood sugar—more than a placebo. How the new drug will compare against similar drugs, called sodium glucose co-transporter-2 inhibitors, remains unclear. Lilly competitors Johnson & Johnson, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and AstraZeneca plc are racing to bring the new class of drugs to market. But Lilly and Boehringer officials said they are pleased enough with the results to file for a launch this year, according to a statement released Monday by Lilly. "We are pleased with the results for these Phase III clinical trials for empagliflozin," Enrique Conterno, president of Lilly's diabetes division, said in a prepared statement. "Diabetes is growing at a tremendous rate across the world. Patients and their physicians need more treatment options in order to help improve their blood sugar levels and reach their treatment goals." Also, Lilly and Boehringer Ingelheim announced that Lilly will re-assume exclusive development rights to a once-a-day insulin it calls LY2605541. That drug, as well as empagliflozin, were part of a co-development agreement Lilly and Boehringer signed in January 2011. Lilly unveiled a better-than-expected 2013 earnings forecast Friday, which sent its stock up by nearly 4 percent that day. The drugmaker forecast 2013 adjusted earnings of between $3.75 and $3.90 per share. Wall Street analysts were expecting 2013 earnings of $3.73 per share, according to a survey by FactSet.

The physician arm of Indianapolis-based hospital system Community Health Network took over cardiovascular services at Community Westview Hospital, displacing The Care Group LLC, on Jan. 1. Community Physician Network will now provide all specialty heart care at the 67-bed hospital at West 38th Street and North Guion Road. Community Health Network absorbed Westview in June 2011, securing a presence on the west side of Indianapolis to accompany its existing hospitals on the southern, eastern and northern sides of the metro area. The Care Group, one of the city’s largest physician practices, was acquired by Indianapolis-based hospital system St. Vincent Health in 2010. Community and St. Vincent are now working together to sign contracts with employers and health insurers in what they call an affordable care consortium.

A building on the northwest side of Indianapolis is the target of a foreclosure claiming that owner Women’s Physician Group LLP has defaulted on a $9 million loan. The lawsuit, filed Dec. 13 by U.S. Bank, claims that the physicians' group received the loan in April 2007 and stopped payment in August 2012, owing $8.7 million in principal. Including penalties and fees, though, U.S. Bank is seeking nearly $10.5 million, according to the suit. The 33,617-square-foot building at 8081 Township Line Road is completely occupied, according to the website of Cornerstone Companies Inc., the building’s broker. A representative of the physician group could not be reached for comment.

Read More

Suburban hospitals charm patients

A little extra Medicare money will flow to suburban hospitals in the Indianapolis area, based on recent patient satisfaction scores. But hospitals in the core of Indianapolis—and hospitals that do significant amounts of teaching medical students—may take a hit.

Read More

Company news

The CEO of Fishers-based Positron Corp., which plans to build a $55 million cyclotron in Noblesville for medical isotopes, faces a lawsuit from the U.S. Secruities and Exchange Commission, alleging he defrauded investors of a hedge fund he operates by secretly investing their money into Positron. CEO Patrick G. Rooney also is founder and managing partner of Oakbrook, Ill.-based Solaris Management. IBJ reported in September that Positron lost $10.9 million last year and at year-end had an accumulated deficit of $102.3 million. Earlier this year, Positron’s accounting firm issued a going-concern warning about the company. The SEC alleges Rooney and Solaris between 2005 and 2008 invested more than $3.6 million of the fund's money in Positron through both private transactions and market purchases of Positron’s common stock. The fund now owns over 1.1 billion shares of Positron, or more than 60 percent of the company. Rooney “hid” the Positron investment and his affiliation with the Fishers company until March 2009, according to the SEC’s lawsuit. At that time “he lied in telling them that he became chairman to safeguard the Solaris Funds’ investment,” the suit states. Rooney could not be immediately reached for comment about the SEC complaint.

Community Health Network plans to move its inpatient rehabilitation facility from its east-side hospital to a new, $23 million facility in the Castleton neighborhood, the Indianapolis-based hospital system announced Monday. The new facility, which will include 60 beds in 63,000 square feet of space, is scheduled to open in the second quarter of 2013. Construction on or near the Community Hospital North campus will begin next year. Community is partnering with Nashville-based Centerre Healthcare on the new facility, which will provide care for neurological, stroke and traumatic injury patients. Community’s inpatient rehabilitation program, called Hook Rehabilitation, will move its services and staff to the new facility when it opens and close the 42-bed unit located in Community Hospital East. Community, which acquired Westview Hospital earlier this year, is also moving ahead with plans to build a Communtiy Westview medical facility in Speedway. According to the Speedway Redevelopment Commission, the 40,000-square-foot health pavilion would include physician offices, imaging equipment and lab testing. It could also serve as a training facility for osteopathic medical students. If approved by the boards of directors for Community and Westview, groundbreaking for the health pavilion could occur as early as spring 2012.

UnitedHealth Group Inc. won the sweepstakes for XLHealth Corp., which had reportedly included Indianapolis-based WellPoint Inc. Baltimore-based XLHealth is the latest company nabbed in a string of acquisitions of Medicare managed care companies. The purchase by Minnesota-based UnitedHealth follows purchases of similar companies by WellPoint and Cigna in June and October, respectively. WellPoint acquired California-based CareMore Health Group, which operates clinics for Medicare patients in California and Arizona. Health insurers are trying to expand their businesses caring for seniors in the federal Medicare program, as the baby boomer generation began to flood into the program this year.

Read More

Company news

Indiana University in Bloomington will begin a professional master’s degree program in medical physics in the fall of 2012. The field involves using the concepts and methods of physics to diagnose and treat disease. The new program will include a curriculum in physics, mathematics, chemistry and biomedical sciences, as well as practical courses in radiation therapy physics, diagnostic imaging physics, nuclear medicine and radiation protection physics.

Westview Healthplex Sports Club took over management of the fitness center on the ground floor of the OneAmerica Tower on Sept. 1. Westview, which is an osteopathic hospital and health club near Lafayette Square Mall, will staff the fitness center with fitness coaches, personal trainers and massage therapists.

Harrison College and WGU Indiana have both formed new partnerships for their nursing programs. Harrison, an Indianapolis-based for-profit school, now will work with Community Health Network’s hospital facilities to help train its associate’s degree students. And WGU Indiana, which launched its nursing program in Indiana earlier this year, will train some of its students at Hancock Regional Hospital in Greenfield. WGU Indiana was formed last year by a partnership between the state of Indiana and Western Governors University, an online college for adult learners. Nursing schools are trying to grow in order to turn out enough nurses to replace the wave of baby boomers that is beginning to retire.

Read More

Company news

Eli Lilly and Co., once the undisputed leader in the U.S. diabetes market, wants to regain its dominance by launching as many as four new diabetes drugs in the next five years, Lilly executives said during an investor meeting June 30. Lilly has lost large chunks of market share in the past decade to Denmark-based Novo Nordisk A/S and France-based Sanofi-Aventis SA. But this year, Lilly, through a partnership with Germany-based launched Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH, launched Tradjenta, a once-daily tablet that will compete with Merck & Co. Inc.’s successful Januvia but could involve fewer complications for patients with liver or kidney problems. As early as next year, Lilly could get the green light on Bydureon, a long-delayed once-weekly version of its Byetta treatment, developed with Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc. Lilly could seek regulatory approval in 2013 for dulaglutide, a once-a-month drug similar to Bydureon. An oral drug called empagliflozin, also gained through the agreement with Boehringer Ingelheim, could launch in 2014. "Diabetes is one of the great opportunities for Lilly moving forward," Jan Lundberg, president of Lilly Research Laboratories, said in an interview with Reuters.

As part of its agreement to add Westview Hospital to its system, Community Health Network will assume $10 million in debt, spend $7.5 million on upgrades, and help open an outpatient center in Speedway, the two hospitals announced June 28. They will also look for more locations in western Indianapolis to add outpatient centers. Community and Westview first announced in November they were in talks to form a “strategic alliance.” On June 24, Westview’s board approved the merger. Westview needed to get bigger, CEO Jon Anderson said, because the 2010 health care reform law and other national trends are pushing hospitals to have some of their revenue hinge on whether they keep a specific population of patients healthy. Westview had annual revenue of $106 million in 2009, the most recent figure available. Community is more than 10 times as large, with annual revenue of $1.3 billion. From Community’s perspective, Westview helps it expand into the western portion of Indianapolis for the first time. In addition to Anderson, Community has hospitals in the southern, eastern and northeastern suburbs of Indianapolis. Community wants to make sure it has facilities accessible on all sides of the city in order to be attractive to employers who want to contract with a hospital system—either directly or through an insurer—that will take responsibility for keeping the employees healthy.

Indiana University Health is losing its chief financial officer, who has overseen the hospital system’s bulging balance sheet since 1999. Marvin Pember, 58, is taking a new job near Philadelphia as president of the acute care division of Universal Health Services Inc., a publicly traded company with 22 acute hospitals and numerous behavioral health centers spread from coast to coast. Pember’s last day at IU Health will be July 29. IU Health, an 18-hospital system based in Indianapolis, will begin a national search for his replacement immediately. Pember joined IU Health, then known as Clarian Health, when it had just three hospitals—Methodist, Indiana University Hospital and Riley Hospital for Children—all in downtown Indianapolis. Today, its hospitals stretch from LaPorte and Goshen in northern Indiana to Paoli and Bedford in the south. IU Health also has three more facilities set to join its fold by year’s end.

Read More

Building binge hasn’t crimped hospital profits

Indianapolis-area hospitals spent billions on construction in the past decade and increasingly tried to poach patients from one another’s territories. Yet last year—one of the worst economically in recent history—21 of 26 hospitals still were able to show operating profits.

Read More

Company news

Carmel-based Dormir Inc. acquired a string of sleep-study centers and equipment stores in California,
Oregon and Utah, making it the nation’s second-largest provider of sleep-diagnostic services in the country behind SleepMed
Inc., headquartered in Columbia, S.C. The sleep centers and equipment stores were part of two subsidiaries of Australia-based
Avastra Sleep Centres Ltd. They give Dormir 85 locations in 16 states. Financial terms of the deal were
not disclosed.

Eli Lilly and Co. said it won approval for a new long-acting
version of its bestselling antipsychotic Zyprexa. The new version has patents that could extend until
2018. Investors have shunned Lilly’s stock this year because they say Indianapolis-based Lilly does not have enough new
drugs to offset the loss of Zyprexa revenue that will occur after the drug loses its patents in 2011. Lilly issued a forecast
for 2012-2014 that suggested its profits could fall by as much as one-third from their present levels.

Lilly
Endowment Inc. will give $60 million to the Indiana University School of Medicine
to implement its new Indiana Physician Scientist Initiative that aims to turn discoveries that could
improve human health into products and treatments that benefit patients and produce new businesses. Dr. David Wilkes,
executive associate dean for research affairs at the IU School of Medicine, will direct the Indiana Physician Scientist Initiative.
Its biggest goal is to recruit 20 physician-scientists to the IU med school to focus on cancer, neurosciences and diabetes/vascular
disease.

Scientists have made chemotherapy drugs better at reducing side effects by engineering them to bind only
to cancerous cells. But researchers at Purdue University are taking an entirely different approach. They
used cold and magnetic particles to create nanorods—about 1,000 times smaller than a human hair. They then coated these
rods with the breast cancer drug Herceptin and inserted them into breast tumors. Professor Joseph Irudayaraj and graduate
student Jiji Chen wrote about their work in the journal ACS Nano.

The Eli Lilly and Co. Foundation
gave $1 million to Indiana University to form a school of public health at IUPUI. Indiana University will
build the school using faculty from its medical school and the School of Public and Environmental Affairs.

Two Fort Wayne consulting firms are joining forces in an attempt to do more work for financially
strapped doctors and hospitals. MedOptima and Ruffolo Benson LLC now
offer expertise in improving billing and other processes, as well as finding capital.

In the
latest combination of fitness and physicians, St. Vincent Health has opened
a rehab therapy clinic at the Fishers YMCA. The 3,900-square-foot clinic will offer
orthopedic, neurological and general rehab care. The first local example of such a partnership is the Westview Healthplex
Sports Club on Guion Road operated by Westview Hospital. Also, Hendricks Regional Health
is working with YMCA to build a joint facility in Avon.

Read More