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Committee OKs bill to help save two closed Hawaii hospitals

Posted: February 10th, 2012, 7:32pm EST

A state House committee on Friday passed a bill to issue $80 million in revenue bonds to St. Francis Healthcare System of Hawaii to upgrade the two shuttered Hawaii Medical Center hospitals. House Bill 2345, which passed the House Health Committee on a vote of 7-0, with three members excused, awaits a hearing in the House Finance Committee before heading to a floor vote. St. Francis would use the money to upgrade the buildings at Hawaii Medical Center East in Liliha and Hawaii Medical Center West in Ewa, upgrade the courtyard and parking garage, modernize technology and equipment and refinance debt at both facilities...
Blunt expected to intro bill on contraception coverage

Posted: February 10th, 2012, 7:00pm EST by Diana Barr

U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., is expected to introduce an amendment to the Affordable Care Act that would allow empoyers and insurance plans to exclude a health servcie from coverage if they morally object to it, blog Think Progress reported late Friday. President Barack Obama on Friday announced an “accommodation” in a Health and Human Services mandate last month that religious institutions must offer contraceptive coverage at no cost to employees, saying instead that health insurance companies would have to provide it...
Report: Pletz committed suicide

Posted: February 10th, 2012, 6:19pm EST

Karen Pletz’s November death was a suicide, The Kansas City Star reported. A medical examiner in Broward County, Fla., ruled on Friday that the former Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences president died from taking a combination of sedatives, pain killers and alcohol, according to the Star report. Broward County medical examiner Darin Trelka was reached after hours but could not immediately comment on Pletz’s death report. Pletz was found dead in a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., condominium on Nov...
Congressional delegation pushes for center for disease

Posted: February 10th, 2012, 4:48pm EST by Megan Kamerick

New Mexico’s congressional delegation is pushing for the creation of a care and research center focused on a genetic disease that is a legacy of New Mexico’s Spanish colonial past. Cerebral Cavernous Malformation affects about 1.5 million Americans, most of whom live in New Mexico. It was common among Spanish settlers in the state in the 1580s and has been passed down through generations. The federal delegation, led by U.S. Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., and U.S. Rep. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., introduced legislation to authorize a Cavernous Angioma Clinical Care, Awareness, Research and Education (CARE) Center of Excellence in the Southwest to increase research and awareness about the disease...
S&P: Cardinal Health ratings unaffected by Lakeland suspension

Posted: February 10th, 2012, 4:31pm EST

Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services said its ratings on Cardinal Health Inc. are not affected by suspension of the company’s license to distribute controlled medications from its distribution center in Lakeland. The Drug Enforcement Administration suspended Cardinal’s license, alleging four of the center’s retail pharmacy customers dispensed controlled substances that were issued for other than a legitimate medical purpose and outside the usual course of professional practices. The order alleged that Cardinal Health failed to conduct meaningful due diligence...
Kaiser 2011 profit held steady at $2B, revenue rose 8.3%

Posted: February 10th, 2012, 4:26pm EST by Chris Rauber

Kaiser Permanente’s net income held steady at roughly $2 billion last year, officials said Friday, the second straight year it’s been below 2009’s profit total of $2.1 billion. Meanwhile, operating revenue jumped 8.3 percent in 2011 to $47.9 billion from the prior year’s total of $44.2 billion. Last year's level of profitability held steady "at levels that are appropriate to invest in infrastructure," such as seismic rebuilds and high-technology investments, according to Tom Meier, Kaiser's senior vice president and treasurer...
Introducing the newest AlphaLab startups

Posted: February 10th, 2012, 4:23pm EST by Malia Spencer

It was another round of coffee-fueled networking on the South Side and the informal unveiling of the latest class of startups to take up residence in AlphaLab. The six startups have been in the accelerator for the past five weeks, and it's a pretty diverse group with everything from gaming, to disease diagnostics, to an insurance rate comparison tool. They will be furiously working on prototypes, gathering beta testers and securing customers from now until Demo Day, which will likely happen sometime in May, but we’ll give you more about that when it gets closer...
Obama compromises on birth control

Posted: February 10th, 2012, 3:05pm EST by James Ritchie

Catholic hospitals, schools and other institutions would not have to get involved in providing birth control to employees under a compromise offered by President Obama. The decision, announced Friday, reverses an earlier determination that such employers, though not churches themselves, would be included in a health-care-reform mandate to provide such coverage. Cincinnati’s Catholic had protested loudly, with Cincinnati Archbishop Dennis Schnurr stating in a letter that the Obama administration “has cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our nation’s first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty...
For FDA, social media’s still in trial phase

Posted: February 10th, 2012, 3:03pm EST by Jim Gardner

An army of tweeting thumbs and Facebook Inc.’s planned $5 billion IPO notwithstanding, Margaret Hamburg isn’t quite ready for social media. “‘Social media’ is a scary term for me,” Hamburg, the top of the food chain in the Food and Drug Administration, told members of the Commonwealth Club this week. That really comes as no surprise to those who have tracked the FDA’s laborious process for devising rules around how drug makers can communicate with patients using Facebook, Twitter and the like...
PharMerica shares rise strong earnings report

Posted: February 10th, 2012, 2:49pm EST by Ed Green

Despite a down market Friday, shares of Louisville-based PharMerica Corp. were up after the company reported strong earnings after the market closed Thursday. As Business First reported late Thursday, PharMerica’s fourth-quarter net income rose to $7.9 million, or 27 cents per share, from $4.7 million, or 16 cents per share, a year earlier. Revenue rose almost 1 percent to $495.6 million. The average estimate of analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial Network was for earnings of 21 cents per share for the quarter and revenue of about $504 million...