Andrew Bindman, a board-certified general internist, will serve as Kaiser Permanente's next EVP and CMO, in today's bite-sized hospital and health industry news from Arizona, California, the District of Columbia, and Texas.

• Arizona/Texas: The Texas-based hospital group Exceptional Healthcare is planning to build six community hospitals throughout Arizona. The first of the planned facilities will be a 20,000-square-foot facility located in Maricopa. The facility will have an internal medicine hospital, ED, and digital imaging suite, and it's currently slated to open in the fall of 2021. Exceptional Healthcare also is planning to build hospitals in Prescott, Yuma, and other cities in Arizona (Paavola, Becker's Hospital Review, 11/5).

• California: Kaiser Permanente on Thursday announcedit has appointed Andrew Bindman, a board-certified general internist, to serve as its EVP and CMO. Bindmancurrently sits on the National Academy of Medicine's board for health care services and is co-leading an effort with CMS to develop radiology quality measures. In his new role, Bindman will collaborate with Kaiser's clinical and operation leaders to improve patient care. Bindman previously has served as director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a professor of at the University of California-San Francisco, a health policy fellow for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and a senior HHS adviser who helped implement the Affordable Care Act (Bannow, Modern Healthcare, 11/5; Gooch, Becker's Hospital Review, 11/5). 

• District of Columbia: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) during a private call with Democratic leaders in the House last week announced a significant expansion of coronavirus testing for House lawmakers, Politico reports. According to Politico, Pelosi said the U.S. Air Force will provide as many as 2,000 polymerase chain reaction coronavirus tests for Congress each week for the next six weeks, at no cost. If a test comes back positive, Brian Monahan, who is the attending physician for Congress, will then perform another test to confirm the results. Politico reports that Pelosi sought to expand coronavirus testing for Congress partially in response to a new order from D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser that requires travelers to Washington, D.C., to receive a negative coronavirus test within 72 hours before traveling to the district, and mandates that travelers planning to spend more than three days in the district receive another coronavirus test once they arrive in the district. However, it's not clear whether the order applies to members of Congress, Politico reports (Bresnahan/Caygle, Politico, 11/5).