Richard Pizzi

Standard & Poor's Ratings Services is reporting that fiscal 2009 key median ratios for U.S. stand-alone hospitals show improvement in operating metrics compared with 2008 ratios.

A total of 233 mergers and acquisitions were announced in the healthcare industry during the second quarter of 2010, up 7 percent from the 218 deals announced in the prior quarter.

Vestar Capital Partners, a New York-based private equity firm, has acquired the independent healthcare ratings firm HealthGrades for approximately $294 million.

Healthcare reform legislation in Massachusetts, first enacted by the commonwealth's legislature in 2006 and revised in 2008, contains payment reform principles that likely offer insight into national reform efforts.

Thirty-four northeastern Ohio hospitals have shown "dramatic progress" in efforts to improve healthcare quality by following national best practices guidelines for patients with certain medical conditions.

A new initiative from the California HealthCare Foundation will focus on reducing preventable patient readmissions in 20 hospitals across the state.

Overall healthcare prices remained flat from May through June, the third consecutive month of price stability, according to data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The United States will be short more than 260,000 registered nurses by 2025 unless it expands nursing education capacity quickly and dramatically, according to a recent report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

New Jersey hospitals provided $2.6 billion in benefits to their communities in 2009 above and beyond the healthcare services they provided to their patients, according to a new report from the New Jersey Hospital Association.

In one of this issue’s cover stories, I discuss a variety of different approaches to boost the number of nursing school graduates in the United States.