Paul A. Hattis

The Health Policy Commission’s annual cost trends hearing didn’t attract much media coverage this year, so I thought I’d summarize what I thought was most interesting.

EVERYONE IS TALKING about the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s decision to abandon its long-term affiliation with Brigham and Women’s Hospital and partner instead with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, which is offering the institute the opportunity to build a much larger free-standing cancer care hospital on the Beth Israel campus. It’s a really big deal, raising […]

Second of two parts. Read the first part here. IF TUFTS MEDICINE is going to turn around financially, clearly there are short-term issues for management focus, but there are also intermediate and long-term ones as well, some of which may require state intervention. For me, there is no question that Tufts Medicine’s survival and vibrancy […]

First of two parts. Read part two here.   I’M WORRIED about Tufts Medicine. The latest news, that its current financial woes could trigger violations of bond covenants by late September, raises the possibility that key services could be shut down, employees laid off, and assets sold. Tufts may even have to partner up with some health system […]

THE ABRUPT hutdown of Compass Medical on May 31 exposed a serious flaw in the state’s health care regulatory system. Compass is an 80-clinician, multi-site practice that provides primary care services to roughly 70,000 patients. Compass officials called employees to an 8 a.m. meeting and told them the company was closing its doors immediately, all […]

WE NEED to invest in ways to reduce medical errors and improve patient safety. The House rejected an amendment that would have provided $3.5 million to address these problems, so now the challenge falls to the Senate. The bill would provide the money to the Betsy Lehman Center to help educate the health care workforce on […]

CLARIFICATION: Soon after this article was published, I heard from Steve Walsh, the president of the Massachusetts Health and Hospital Association, who said I misrepresented what he said at the Health Policy Commission’s March benchmark hearing. He said he never called for the state to abandon the use of a cost-growth benchmark measure.  Steve suggested […]

IT’S MARCH, so that means it is time for the men’s and women’s NCAA basketball tournament and all of the suspense, surprise, and excitement connected to it. But March also brings us the 7th annual Massachusetts Health Policy Commission health care cost growth benchmark hearing—scheduled this year for March 15.  Though prior hearings have lacked any “buzzer […]