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Covid-19 isn’t expected to slow the pace of health care construction in New York City. A new report from the New York Building Congress projects spending to increase 38% through 2023 compared with the previous four-year period. The city’s hospitals and other medical providers spent $6.8 billion on construction projects from 2016 to 2019, and that spending is expected to total $9.4 building from 2020 to 2023, the Building Congress said. (Lamantia, 7/20)

In a series of focus groups conducted with primary care providers in four US cities, most participants consistently identified antibiotic resistance as a lower priority compared with other health concerns, and suggested that urgent care, retail clinics, and patient demand were the key drivers of inappropriate prescribing, researchers reported last week in BMJ Open. The eight focus groups, which were conducted by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the American Medical Association in Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Birmingham, included family medicine and internal medicine physicians and pediatricians. In each focus group, an independent moderator asked the participants to rank a number of public health issues in terms of importance, then asked questions aimed at understanding physicians' attitudes and perceptions around antibiotic use and stewardship. A total 52 primary care providers participated in the recorded discussions. (7/14)

Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurers once again racked up some of the largest risk-adjustment payments under an Affordable Care Act program meant to discourage individual and small-group insurers from cherry-picking healthy employees, CMS data show. Blue Shield of California is set to receive the largest single risk-adjustment payment of $1.04 billion across the individual, catastrophic and small-group markets, according to Modern Healthcare's analysis of CMS data released Friday. The analysis excluded the high-cost risk pools and merged markets. (Livingston, 7/20)

Cordant Health Solutions agreed to pay nearly $12 million to settle allegations that it paid kickbacks to boost its urine testing business, the U.S. Justice Department said Monday. Denver-based Cordant allegedly paid millions of dollars to Northwest Physicians Laboratories and Genesis Marketing Group from 2013 to 2015 in exchange for referrals of urine tests that were funded by federal healthcare programs. The settlement, which stemmed from a 2015 whistleblower lawsuit, specifically applies to two Cordant operated labs: Sterling Reference Laboratory in Tacoma, Wash., and Forensic Laboratories in Denver. (Kacik, 7/20)