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As Covid-19 positivity rates rise in the city and surrounding areas, hospital leaders are on high alert, with the spring’s surge still fresh on their minds. For months they’ve been preparing for this moment. Most have stockpiles of supplies and new safety measures and treatments, and a vaccine or two are on the horizon. But an uptick in cases and hospitalizations is still alarming. It’s already producing higher volumes in emergency departments and intensive-care units, and it could mean another drop in the preventive care and elective procedures hospitals have worked so hard to bring back. (Henderson, 11/23)

AdventHealth on Monday announced a project with biotechnology company Berg to try to better tailor treatments for COVID-19 patients. AdventHealth and Berg are kicking off the project as a research effort, initially building a biobank with data pulled from health records of AdventHealth patients who received COVID-19 testing. From there, the groups plan to apply Berg's artificial-intelligence tools to flag interventions linked with better outcomes in specific patient populations, based on such characteristics as ethnicity or comorbidities. (Kim Cohen, 11/23)

The parent organization of Northern Light Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor lost more than $100 million in patient revenue as the coronavirus pandemic forced it to cancel or delay many surgeries and other services last spring. However, in a pair of reports released last week, two prominent credit rating agencies have mostly stood by their assessments that the organization is generally on track to pay back its existing bond debt but could struggle with unanticipated operating challenges. (Eichacker, 11/24)

KHN: Rural Areas Send Their Sickest Patients To Cities, Straining Hospitals

Registered nurse Pascaline Muhindura has spent the past eight months treating COVID patients at Research Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri. But when she returns home to her small town of Spring Hill, Kansas, she’s often stunned by what she sees, like on a recent stop for carryout food. (Smith, 11/24)

KHN: For Nurses Feeling The Strain Of The Pandemic, Virus Resurgence Is ‘Paralyzing’

For Christina Nester, the pandemic lull in Massachusetts lasted about three months through summer into early fall. In late June, St. Vincent Hospital had resumed elective surgeries, and the unit the 48-year-old nurse works on switched back from taking care of only COVID-19 patients to its pre-pandemic roster of patients recovering from gallbladder operations, mastectomies and other surgeries. That is, until October, when patients with coronavirus infections began to reappear on the unit and, with them, the fear of many more to come. “It’s paralyzing, I’m not going to lie,” said Nester, who’s worked at the Worcester hospital for nearly two decades. “My little clan of nurses that I work with, we panicked when it started to uptick here.” (Huff, 11/24)

KHN: Need A COVID-19 Nurse? That’ll Be $8,000 A Week

In March, Claire Tripeny was watching her dream job fall apart. She’d been working as an intensive care nurse at St. Anthony Hospital in Lakewood, Colorado, and loved it, despite the mediocre pay typical for the region. But when COVID-19 hit, that calculation changed. She remembers her employers telling her and her colleagues to “suck it up” as they struggled to care for six patients each and patched their protective gear with tape until it fully fell apart. The $800 or so a week she took home no longer felt worth it. (Hawryluk and Bichell, 11/24)

A Mississippi doctor has been acquitted on seven of eight counts against him in what prosecutors said was about $18 million in health care fraud involving expensive prescription pain cream. His secretary was acquitted on all five counts against her. Jurors were unable to agree on the eighth count — making false statements relating to health care — against Dr. Gregory Auzenne, The Clarion Ledger reported. The newspaper said the U.S. Attorney’s Office did not immediately comment Monday on whether it planned to retry that charge. (11/23)

No one knows when, exactly, Mutlay Sayan was born. His mother told him it was sometime in the summer, before the harvest. The delivery took place on their porch, with the help of the neighbors, who used a heated kitchen knife to cut the umbilical cord, in a year that may or may not have been 1987. (Boodman, 11/24)