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HCA Healthcare says it has reached an agreement to share data about COVID-19 care at the company’s hospitals with prominent research institutions. The Nashville-based company announced Tuesday that some of the entities participating include the federal Agency for Health Research and Quality, Johns Hopkins University, Duke University, Meharry Medical College and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute. (1/27)

The consortium, which includes private research organizations and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, is an effort by HCA to leverage its large repository of data on COVID-19 patients amassed through its network of 187 hospitals. Hospital giant HCA has clinical data from 110,000 hospitalized COVID-19 patients in 2020. "We have always believed that the privilege of scale is not size, it's the ability to accelerate learning," said Dr. Jonathan Perlin, chief medical officer of the Nashville, Tenn.-based health system. "We thought, if we could open these data safely and effectively to colleagues and the federal government and the best minds in academia, we can accelerate what is known about COVID and its treatment, and by doing so, save lives." (Castellucci, 1/26)

WalgreensBoots Alliance Inc. named Starbucks Corp. operating chief Rosalind Brewer as its next chief executive, setting her up to be the only Black woman leading a Fortune 500 company today. Ms. Brewer will replace Stefano Pessina, who said in July that he would step down as CEO once the drugstore company found a new leader. Mr. Pessina, one of Walgreens’ biggest individual investors, will stay on the company’s board and serve as executive chairman. (Mattioli and Lombardo, 1/26)

Physician net revenue was down 4.5% in 2020 compared to 2019 as the industry still struggles with declines in patient volumes due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a new report finds. The report released Tuesday by the consulting firm Kaufman Hall said that practices must navigate the continuing shift away from fee-for-service Medicare and to the payer mix away from commercial plans to Medicaid due to job losses stemming from the pandemic. (King, 1/26)

Let’s face it: 2020 was a very, very big year for health care. If you had any doubt about that blatantly obvious statement, the latest federal lobbying disclosures should drive that point home. The trade associations for hospitals, drug makers, drug middlemen, health insurers and doctors spent a collective $81 million on lobbying this year, according to STAT’s tally. (And that’s only five organizations…) (Florko, 1/26)

An Illinois board voted to deny an application from Livonia, Mich.-based Trinity Health to build an outpatient center in a South Side Chicago neighborhood where it wants to close its 170-year-old inpatient hospital, according to the Chicago Tribune. Trinity filed a certificate of need application with the state last November for permission to open a $13 million, 13,000-square-foot outpatient care center about 2 miles away from the hospital it wants to close, Mercy Hospital & Medical Center in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood.  (Paavola, 1/26)

Speaking at a virtual public forum sponsored by the Greater Indianapolis NAACP and the Indianapolis Recorder last week, the heads of Eskenazi Health, Community Health Network and Indiana University Health shared what they have and will do to address health disparities. The forum came against the backdrop of a recent incident in which a Black physician, Dr. Susan Moore, alleged in a video that went viral that she had received discriminatory treatment at IU Health North. The event organizers said that the forum, initially planned for November, aimed to focus on holding hospitals accountable for the pledge. Together the three hospital systems oversee more than 70% of the state’s physician workforce, said co-moderator Joseph Tucker Edmonds, a member of the NAACP’s education committee and an assistant professor of religious studies and Africana studies at IUPUI. (Rudavsky, 1/27)

Robin Young wants you to know she thinks her second knee replacement is the least important thing in the world. While hospitals are caught in the grips of a Covid-19 surge that is straining their capacity, she doesn’t compare her pain to the life-and-death struggles that have erased most elective surgery from hospital booking calendars. (Cooney, 1/27)

A former Veterans Affairs doctor was sentenced to 25 years in prison for sexually abusing patients, officials announced Tuesday. Jonathan Yates, 52, was formerly an osteopathic medicine physician who worked at the Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center in Beckley, West Virginia. In September, he pleaded guilty to three felony counts of sexual assault of veterans seeking treatment for chronic pain through osteopathic manipulative therapy. (Reed, 1/26)