Latest on Healthcare in Massachusetts

Recently Steward Hospital Group has announced that it will be auctioning off all of it's 31 properties as it has been struggled to pay off the debts it owes to a tune of approximately $9 billion. As of now, there is a lot of talk and speculation, especially here in the Bay State of which hospitals already have interested buyers. The Good Samaritan Hospital in Brockton and St. Anne's in Fall River seem to be two of the more appealing to some neighboring hospitals to look to acquire with in the short term. As of right now though, concern seems to be coming from those patients who are having the short term needs and appointments specifically with MRI and CT scans. Staff at Steward's Haverhill hospital have already made it know that there equipment has been "reposessed." Concerns about the debt Steward owe also extends to Fresenius Dialysis patients and other routine scheduled imaging and routine outpatient services. Steward Hospital Group operates 8 hospitals within ...

 December 2023 - Alert Ambulance awarded a 5 year contract with the VA hospitals in Massachusetts.  Previously this contract was with Brewster Ambulance headquartered in Weymouth, MA. The veterans hospitals are a large patient provider with numerous calls each year. Strategically this might have been in Brewsters favor as they calls garnered from these facilities tend to have a wide pull on resources if you are not positioned to take ambulances from outside of Boston and bring them into the city.  Alert may be in a better position to service these calls while also growing there company as they continue to expand their presence outside of Rhode Island.  The contract is a 5 year contract with VA Boston Healthcare.

Back in October 2017,  The Department of Public Health was alerted by Kindred Nursing and Rehabilitation of their closing on Oct. 31. The plan was to close by mid January. January 9th to be precise. Now,  New England Sinai Acute Long-Term Care And Rehabilitation Hospital also in Stoughton has announced their plans to file about the first week of January. By December of 2023, mployees had been urged to start using their PTO up as soon as they can. The facility is part of Steward Healthcare. The company is based out of Dallas, Texas and has other facilities in Massachusetts including Norwood Hospital which has been closed due to flooding back in June of 2020 and Carney Hospital which is also plagued with financial issues. Steward Healthcare operates in 8 states in total and has a large, though shrinking, presence in Massachusetts. New England Sinai has been one of the few specialty facilities of its kind  South of Boston, comparable to the likes Vibra Hosptial out in New Be...

Nursing homes transports have always been a staple of private EMS providers in Massachusetts. Now with rate cuts the lack of working EMTs (has always been an issue) and the larger companies snatching up new resource intensive contracts, the nursing homes are left out as the undesirables now. Nursing homes and skilled nursing facilities patients as well as home dialysis patients are steadily having a harder and harder time finding transportation, a sharp change that has seen large scale effects within the last few years especially. In 2018, the Bipartisan Budget Act, saw EMS companies looking for new opportunities in revenue as ESRD patient reimbursements got cut. While Covid19 sent many business across the country into survival mode as they began loosing money at an alarming pace, EMS companies across Massachusetts found themselves flush with cash as the opportunity to make greater money with a lower call volume presented itself to those business that were able to adapt quickly and tha...

So not going to lie, I was skep tical. I was skeptical about getting the vaccine, even knowing that I had already made up my mind to get it.  My wife, was one of the states earliest cases of the vaccine in the state way back when Trump and many others where still routinely calling it the Wuhan virus or Chinese virus. We had no clue what the virus was about, the media was pushing fear and doom putting everyone in a frenz and there was very little real reliable information out there about what was real and not real with this vaccine. Well all I know still for a fact is my wife got it in bad way. Like a very bad case of Covid that rocked her world  and me... I got nothing. Not even a sniffle even though I was quarantined with her. Shared bed with her, breathed her air kissed her, took that virus in deep in my lungs and had kept constantly exposed to it in the home with her. She recovered, I came out of quarantine. I have had a couple Covid-19 tests and negative I stil...

 Monday 2/22/2021 begins the next phase for Massachusetts residents eligibility to receive the  Coronavirus vaccine. Up until this date we have been working from Governor Baker's Phase 1 vaccination rollout.  So, welcome to Phase 2.  The plan is, with the roll out, to getting the rest of the critical care workers coming face to face with the vaccine as well as those other higher at risks groups. Which places have which vaccines though? Who has the Moderna vaccine and who has the Pfizer vaccine. And more recently, who in Fall River is giving out the new one shot Johnson and Johnson coronavirus vaccine.