Healthcare · Operations & Workforce
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12 articles · Healthcare · Operations & Workforce
Articles
Week of 29 June 2026
July 1 in teaching hospitals: thousands of joiners, movers and leavers in one week
Every July, US teaching hospitals welcome a wave of new doctors, promote others and say goodbye to graduates, all in one week. It is the biggest identity and access event of their year, and its four parts each fail in their own way.
Week of 30 March 2026
What payers’ first prior authorization numbers needed from providers to be useful
By March 31, 2026, health plans had to publish how often they approve care requests and how fast. The numbers were rates without volumes, averaged across whole books of business, and only became useful once a health system added its own counts.
Week of 26 January 2026
A two-year telehealth runway is long enough to build on and too short to bet on
After yet another lapse in late January, Congress extended Medicare telehealth through 2027 and hospital at home through September 2030. Health systems can finally plan, but only by sorting each virtual service by how long its legal footing lasts.
Week of 6 May 2024
Bigger network, thinner safety net: Ascension’s outage hit every sister hospital at once
In a big health system, hospitals cover for each other with beds, staff and shared services. When ransomware knocked out Ascension’s shared platforms across its markets, that safety net failed everywhere at once, and help had to come from outside.
Week of 27 November 2023
Ardent took one network offline, and emergency departments in six states had to answer for it
Over Thanksgiving 2023, Ardent Health took its network offline to fight ransomware. The decision was made centrally but felt locally, in hospitals carrying partners’ names across six states. Multi-state operators need those lines of authority settled before the next holiday weekend.
Week of 8 May 2023
After the emergency, telehealth’s rules landed on clinicians one deadline at a time
The COVID-19 emergency ended in May 2023, and telehealth’s pandemic flexibilities unwound on schedules set separately by Congress, the DEA, OCR and the states, each landing on a different workforce question: what clinicians may prescribe remotely, where they may practice, which tools they may use.
Week of 30 May 2022
No patch yet: Follina and Confluence tested who may switch things off
Two security holes were being exploited before any fix existed, leaving health systems with workarounds only. What decided the outcome was organizational: who could authorize switching something off, who could actually do it everywhere, and who checked that it worked.
Week of 28 March 2022
Spring4Shell rewarded hospitals that could size a response in hours
Four months after Log4Shell, a Java flaw with a similar nickname set off fresh alarm, and early reports mixed it up with another bug. Its narrow conditions tested whether tired hospital IT teams could size a response in hours.
Week of 22 November 2021
Omicron’s scarcest resource was staff, and few hospitals could count them in real time
When Omicron arrived in late November 2021, hospitals braced for a flood of patients. What actually ran out that winter was staff able to work, and every hard decision hinged on how fast leaders could piece together who was available from scattered systems.
Week of 3 May 2021
Four weeks on paper: what Scripps exposed about downtime plans
After a ransomware attack, Scripps Health spent most of May 2021 without its electronic health record. Downtime plans written for hours failed over weeks on three separate fronts: keeping care safe, keeping revenue flowing and keeping staff going.
Week of 21 September 2020
What a nationwide EHR outage at UHS asked of nurses and unit leaders
Universal Health Services lost systems across its network in September 2020. The downtime binder mattered less than a human question: could staff trained on electronic records run a unit on paper for days, and then put it all back?
Week of 27 July 2020
Lifespan’s stolen laptop and the home office risk analyses missed
A laptop stolen from an employee’s car cost Lifespan $1,040,000. The July 2020 settlement turned on missing encryption, a weak device inventory and absent agreements, landing just as health care’s office staff moved home, beyond the reach of risk analyses written for hospital buildings.