Sometimes the old favorites don’t disappoint! Tenet is in the news again with some more subpoenas about possible fraudulent referrals, this time in Louisiana, and a spat with Blue Cross in California which said that half its cardiac procedures at Doctors Medical Center of Modesto were unnecessary. In fact things got so nasty last week that the CEO of the hospital was going to sue Blue Cross for defamation! It looks like Blue Cross is keeping the hospital in its network for now.  Tenet however believes that the root of this dispute was a fight over $50m in reimbursements, and of course we don’t yet know how that got settled.

Meanwhile, remember the little company that Tenet was using for reporting (having fired Perot systems)? Well apparently that company took over another that held a big repository of (patient-identified) medical errors.  During the first monthly conference call a rustling was heard on the other side of the phone and then no one answered.  Apparently the repo man had come a knockin’. It seems that the lease hadn’t been paid and that they were kicked out of the office–immediately. I’m sure none of the hospitals using that service would be worried about the security of their error data, would they?