Walgreens Boots Alliance, in partnership with primary care startup VillageMD, plans to open 40 new primary care clinics by the end of summer 2021, in today's bite-sized hospital and health industry news from Arizona, Florida, Maryland, and Texas.
- Arizona/Florida/Texas: Walgreens Boots Alliance, in partnership with primary care startup VillageMD, plans to open 40 new primary care clinics by the end of summer 2021 in Arizona, Florida, and Texas, starting with locations outside Houston and Phoenix. The move is part of Walgreens' larger plan to open between 500 and 700 new primary care clinics at Walgreens stores in over 30 markets in the United States over the next five years (Reuter, MedCity News, 12/7; Hackett, Healthcare Finance News, 12/7).
- Maryland: As Maryland's hospitalization rates for Covid-19 have climbed, the state has begun using the Maryland Institute for Emergency Medical Services Systems (MIEMSS), a coordinated care system used for trauma care, to find available beds for patients. Hospitals update a database with information on their available beds, as well as staffing levels and how many critical and acute patients arrived overnight. Then, if a hospital that's overwhelmed has to transfer a patient, it can call a coordinator with MIEMSS who will search and find the best location for that patient, and then call that hospital to confirm a bed is still available. The initiative applies not only to Covid-19 patients, but any patient who needs to be transferred to a hospital that isn't overwhelmed with patients (Cox, Washington Post, 12/6).
- Texas: Baylor College of Medicine last week named Ramsay Camp as a professor and chief of surgical oncology at the Michael E. DeBakey Department of Surgery's Division of Surgical Oncology. Camp previously worked for 12 years at the Medical University of South Carolina and will be caring for patients at Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center in Houston (Carbajal, Becker's Hospital Review, 12/3).
