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COVID-19, which rapidly put healthcare transactions on hold, has exacerbated the conditions for organizations — especially smaller ones — that were seeking a partner due to financial distress or risk. At the same time, the financial fallout of losing revenues from nonessential surgeries and procedures has left larger systems rethinking plans to grow through acquisitions, mergers and other partnerships. (Coutré, 6/22)

Kaiser Health News: Pandemic Forced Insurers To Pay For In-Home Treatments. Will They Disappear?

After seven days as an inpatient for complications related to heart problems, Glenn Shanoski was initially hesitant when doctors suggested in early April that he could cut his hospital stay short and recover at home — with high-tech 24-hour monitoring and daily visits from medical teams. But Shanoski, a 52-year-old electrician in Salem, Massachusetts, decided to give it a try. He’d felt increasingly lonely in a hospital where the COVID pandemic meant no visitors. Also, Boston’s Tufts Medical Center wanted to free up beds for a possible surge of the coronavirus. (Appleby, 6/23)

Gundersen Health System is adopting artificial intelligence for collecting payments from health insurers and expanding telemedicine usage, measures it hopes will yield long-term cost savings even as the hospital operator suffers losses stemming from the coronavirus pandemic. “Once the pandemic hit, we said as an organization, if we were to thrive, we need all hands on deck to carry out our digital strategy,” said Gerald Oetzel, finance chief for the La Crosse, Wis.-based nonprofit health provider. (Chen, 6/22)

Alarmed that colleagues were bribing Chinese doctors and giving kickbacks to hospital workers to boost drug sales, an employee at the British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline began documenting the alleged crimes in the fall of 2010 and sending detailed notes to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice. Using an anonymous email address, the GSK employee sent similar packages to regulators in China. No one responded — for years. (Barboza, 6/23)