Healthcare · Economics & Procurement
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14 articles · Healthcare · Economics & Procurement
Articles
Week of 5 October 2026
Rural health transformation money runs on three clocks, and only two of them come with funding
In October 2026 states hurried to commit their first-year Rural Health Transformation money. For rural providers, the deadline that matters most comes later, when the grants end and the technology they bought has to pay its own way.
Week of 26 May 2025
How ConnectWise’s breach tested small practices’ business associate agreements
In May 2025 a nation-state intrusion hit ConnectWise, a maker of remote access software that sits two contracts away from most physician practices. Their IT services and business associate agreements are their only real controls, and most say too little.
Week of 24 February 2025
The House budget vote signaled Medicaid churn, a cost hospitals pay at the front desk
A narrow February 2025 House vote set Medicaid on the path to big changes. Beyond lost revenue, more frequent eligibility checks and work requirements would make it costlier to know who is covered, at the front desk, in enrollment help and in billing.
Week of 30 September 2024
Saline exposed the risk that hides in a hospital’s cheapest line items
One flooded Baxter plant put IV fluids on ration across the country. Cheap essentials end up made in very few places because low prices reward scale, so hospitals should manage them by how critical they are to care, using four practical levers.
Week of 3 June 2024
Synnovis put a price on pathology consolidation that no contract carried
Ransomware at Synnovis showed south-east London what consolidating pathology really costs. Pooling a region’s labs into one partner saves money every year and concentrates a rare, very large loss. The business case counted the savings. No contract, budget or insurance policy carried the loss.
Week of 4 March 2024
Days of cash on hand was the resilience metric that mattered in the Change Healthcare outage
Two weeks into the Change Healthcare outage, the federal response was about money. For providers that were never hacked, survival came down to three questions: how long could they last, who would lend to them, and who would finally pay for the loss.
Week of 28 August 2023
Medicare’s negotiated prices would reach hospital pharmacies as refunds, and refunds have float
Medicare named its first ten drugs for price negotiation in August 2023. Hospitals with their own pharmacies inherited three problems with three different owners: the cash a refund ties up, the tangle with 340B, and the reconciliation systems both depend on.
Week of 31 July 2023
Prospect Medical’s ransomware attack ended up on the table in a hospital sale
Ransomware hit Prospect Medical Holdings in August 2023, striking an operator already short of money and midway through selling three Connecticut hospitals. For operators like that, cyber resilience becomes a balance-sheet and deal term, priced by buyers, lenders and state approvers.
Week of 26 December 2022
Section 524B gave hospitals a baseline to buy against
A spending law signed in December 2022 told medical device makers to build in cybersecurity. It never mentioned hospitals, yet it handed them something they had long lacked: a federal baseline to cite when choosing devices and writing contracts. Older equipment stayed where it was.
Week of 1 August 2022
Why buying the same software as your neighbors removes your fallback
Ransomware at one NHS software supplier knocked urgent care systems offline across many providers at once, and neighbors could not cover for each other because they ran the same product. U.S. health systems buying shared software face the same exposure.
Week of 20 December 2021
Oracle bought Cerner, and Cerner customers inherited a cloud strategy
Oracle’s December 2021 deal to buy Cerner gave hospitals running Cerner’s records a new owner with its own database, cloud and priorities. What mattered next was roadmap, hosting and contract terms, and when to act on each.
Week of 19 July 2021
How a bed-count fine repriced hospital price secrecy
In July 2021, CMS proposed tying hospital price transparency fines to bed count, so the biggest systems could no longer cheaply pay to keep their rates hidden. Compliance became a permanent data product, read most closely by payers, employers and competitors rather than patients.
Week of 16 November 2020
Permission to donate cybersecurity arrived without the money to run it
In November 2020, regulators finally let hospitals give cybersecurity to the small physician practices around them, free of charge. A legal barrier fell overnight. Whether anyone was actually safer depended on budgets, staffing and who would run the tools year after year.
Week of 1 June 2020
UCSF’s ransom decision was shaped long before the attack
Ransomware hit servers at UCSF’s School of Medicine in June 2020, and the university chose to pay. The decision looked like a crisis call but was largely settled in advance, by backups, where data lived, insurance terms and which advisers were already on retainer.