Just when Tenet thought it was safe to poke its head out, a court has taken it back behind the woodshed and ordered it to pay $273m rather than the $9m it thought it owed to John C. Bedrosian, a cofounder of National Medical Enterprises. NME is of course one of the predecessors of Tenet, and the one that was taken to the woodshed itself for committing patients to involuntary psychiatric stays. Then at 4pm EST on Friday 31 October (nice timing , eh?) the Halloween horrors continued as prosecutors widened their probe of cardiac surgery (the issue that started the current rot at Tenet’s Redding, CA hospital) to several other hospitals. With that news at least one analyst, Sheryl Skolnick, of Fulcrum Global Partners, threw in the towel and lowered her price target for Tenet to $9.40  (it closed at $13 and change) based on the dire prediction of the break-up of the company. "If they broke it up, sold the assets and paid off all liabilities, they’d end up with $9.40 a share in value," she said.

Maybe that’s the end of the bad news, but on the other hand Tenet watchers worried about its relationship with the Feds might want to check this out. I heard from a little bird (and as this is not public info yet, treat it as rumor) that Tenet has chosen a tiny firm with fewer than 20 employees, 2 servers, and a single DSL line, to take over encounter reconciliation and JCAHO Core Measures submission for all its 110+ hospitals. (Perot Systems previously had the task). There are suspicions that Tenet’s choice may not have the people, experience, expertise, hardware or network infrastructure to do the job AND the (third strike) deadline for Tenet to get its Core Measures submission to JCAHO (they already have 2 strikes) correctly is in January. 

According to my scuttlebutt, their new vendor currently receives small extracted files of de-identified UB-92 data from about 65 hospitals on a monthly or quarterly basis and one employee manually checks them out before sunmitting them to JCAHO.  The new arrangement means that the vendor will need to receive (on a continuous transaction basis) raw encounter data from whatever ADT system that each of the Tenet hospitals has (they’re, of course, not all the same), process and reconcile data for each quarter (probably a couple of million records per hospital) and extract the pertinent data elements from it. My source severely doubts that this system is the sort of thing that anyone could develop from scratch (let alone test) in 75 days.  His guess is that any Tenet IT peron who knows anything (and would have done any due diligence) went the way of the (ex-) general counsel. 

This means that potentially Tenet is placing the ability of any and all of their hospitals to see Medicare patients in unproven hands. So in the worst case scenario, the company may end up with a bunch of non-Medicare admissible hospitals, which would make it worth less than in Scholnick’s worst case scenario!