Frisco Medical Center in Frisco, Texas, filed a suit against Cynthia Bledsoe and her new employer Forest Park Medical Center. The suit alleges that around the time of her resignation, Bledsoe used cloud storage services to upload files owned by the hospital.

The stolen files include training packets, strategic business plans, peer reviews and a file that appears to be protected patient information.

Frisco Medical Center says it discovered the alleged theft after hiring a forensic IT service to examine Bledsoe’s computer a few weeks after she tendered her resignation.

Bledsoe had worked for Frisco for 10 years in various positions. She had been promoted to chief operating officer in September of last year. She accepted a job offer from local competitor Forest Park Medical Center in October, and turned in her resignation on Nov. 1.

Frisco accuses Bledsoe of violating a number of laws, as well as breach of contract, breach of duty and breach of fiduciary duty. Frisco is seeking a restraining order and a permanent injunction against Bledsoe, as well as financial damages, interest and attorney’s fees.

So far, no comment from Bledsoe or Forest Park about the matter.

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A nurse is accused of killing five of her patients by injecting bleach into their dialysis tubes. Kimberly Saenz is on trial for capital murder charges in the five deaths. Saenz pleaded not guilty. If she’s convicted, prosecutors have said they will seek the death penalty.

At the time of the deaths, Saenz had been working as an entry-level vocational nurse at DaVita Dialysis in Lufkin, Texas.

The charges were filed about a year after a local fire official wrote an anonymous letter to the state health department. In the April 2008 letter, the official raised a red flag over a series of suspicious incidents at the clinic which resulted in paramedics being called to the scene.

Among other things, the letter detailed a two-week period in which 16 patients had to be transported by ambulance from the clinic.

Within days, investigators were at the clinic — and discovered that paramedics had been called to the clinic 30 times that month. Nineteen people had to be transported to the hospital (seven of them with cardiac complaints) — and four people had died after treatment at the clinic. For reference, in the previous 15 months, ambulance crews had been called only twice.

On April 28, 2008, inspectors were on-site when two patients were stricken ill — and others said they had witnessed Saenz inject bleach into dialysis tubes being used by two patients. Saenz was sent home, the local police were called and the clinic was shut down. The two patients later died.

Subsequent investigation found traces of bleach in various equipment used to treat some of the patients who got sick or died. DaVita had used bleach in various concentrations to clean both internal machinery parts and chairs used by patients. Staffers were supposed to use reactive agents to confirm that any bleach residue had been removed and that the cleaned items were safe for patient use.

More details into the investigation are hard to come by — the court’s put a gag order on all parties involved. But Saenz’s lawyers have noted previously that their client has no criminal record and no apparent motive for trying to kill her patients. Her lawyers have suggested that the clinic was sloppy about its disinfectant procedures and that she’s being used as a scapegoated for systemic problems.

However, prosecutors paint Saenz’s history in less generous terms, noting a history of prescription painkiller abuse, addiction, and having been fired from four prior health care jobs. Prosecutors say she also lied on a more recent employment application, in violation of her bail agreement.

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One expert estimated a legitimate practice would have to be treating a million patients at 30 locations to justify the kind of billings Roy racked up.

Prosecutors say Roy and his office manager paid so-called recruiters $50 a pop to go door-to-door in neighborhoods, asking the residents to sign off on forms stating the doctor had treated them in their homes. The recruiters also signed up residents at local homeless shelters.

The office manager and the owners of five local home health agencies were also charged in relation to the fraud. Additionally, $2.3 million in payments to 78 other home health agencies were suspended.

Federal officials discovered the fraud through the use of new data analysis tools intended to catch unusual billing practices or trends. For an example of what kinds of data could be a red flag, 99% of doctors have certified 104 or fewer patients for home health care. Roy had certified more than 5,000.

If convicted, Roy faces a maximum sentence of 100 years in prison and a minimum of $18.5 in fines.

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The 200+ bed non-profit hospital has a history of less-than-stellar relations with its medical staff for the past few years. The conflicts have centered on whether Summersett should have to release financial reports, tax returns and other internal documents.The issue is currently the subject of an on-going lawsuit.

Summersett has also been accused of strong-arming the Board of Directors and kicking off people who asked too many questions regarding his actions.

Relations hit a boiling point recently when the contracts for the hospital’s emergency room doctors weren’t renewed. The ED is now being staffed with doctors outsourced from outside the immediate area.

Recently, doctors, nurses, other staff and members of the local community staged a rally complete with protest signs (“Summersett we regret”) and 60′s-style chants of “CEO’s got to go.”

Summersett didn’t release a statement, but the hospital Board of Directors did, noting the technological improvements Knapp has made, new services its offering and reiterating its mission of providing the highest quality healthcare to the community. It didn’t mention the outsourcing of the ER staffing or address the protesters’ other complaints.

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Dr. Sam Jahani was arrested in Texas. Authorities are still looking for Dr. Eric Peper, who currently lives in Florida.

Peper worked for Jahani’s clinics in the Denver area between 2006 and 2010.

Prosecutors allege that both doctors defrauded Medicaid, Medicare and Rocky Mountain Health Plans by billing for procedures that weren’t rendered — including some medical services provided after the patients had died. They’re also charged with over-prescribing painkillers to patients that caused their deaths.

The feds estimated the doctors made more than $43.2 million in fraudulent claims in those four years.

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The patient, Dallas Wiens of Fort Worth, Texas, is 25 and listed in good condition. A team of 30 doctors performed the operation which gave Wiens a new nose, lips and facial skin as well as muscles and nerves to provide the skin with sensation.

Wiens was injured in an electrical accident in November 2008, leaving him blind and without lips, a nose or eyebrows. The surgery wasn’t able to restore his eyesight, due to nerve damage.

The hospital wouldn’t release any information on the donor, or say when exactly the surgery was performed. Wiens is expected to not look exactly like he used to, nor like the donor. Instead, his face will be a combination of his own underlying bone structure and the donor’s facial features.

The federal health reform law helped make the surgery financially possible, since it allows Wiens to afford the expensive drug regimen he’ll need to maintain the transplanted tissue. Wiens was uninsured when he was injured and Medicaid covered approximately two dozen procedures, until his disability payments put him over the income limit.

Under the health reform law, he qualifies for coverage on his father’s insurance until he’s 26. At that point, Medicare will kick in.

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That’s the lesson recently learned by Kawai Ary-Berry, a licensed massage therapist in Lubbock, Texas. She was found guilty of a range of health care fraud offenses, including billing the federal worker’s compensation fund for services never performed, billing for massage services she improperly coded as physical therapy and fraudulently billing the government for “equipment rental” when she had patients sit in a sauna.

Berry now faces 78 months in federal prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, and must pay $1.6 million in restitution.

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The hospitals at the center of the investigation are University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and Parkland Memorial Hospital.

One of the main allegations is that UT Southwestern didn’t supervise residents as they should have to meet the requirements for procedures billed to Medicare and Medicaid.

UT Southwestern in particular is known for giving second-year residents wide latitude to perform some procedures with minimal supervision. The feds are investigating whether procedures actually done by the residents were billed as though they had been performed by the hospitals’ physicians.

The residents were working at Parkland. It’s not clear to what extent the feds are investigating that hospital’s involvement.

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Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas used a two-prong approach to cut the average wait time to be seen by a doctor from four or more hours to 54 minutes.

The hospital changed its procedures for treating ED patients to make it faster to get the sickest patients admitted to other units, and to send the least serious cases to the hospital’s urgent care clinic.

Patients seem to notice and appreciate the difference. Previously, up to 18% of ED patients left without being treated — presumably in part because of the long wait times. Now, only 4% leave without being seen.

The more efficient system helped the hospital handle an unexpected surge in ED visits this year. Parkland is on track to see up to 200,000 ED patients this year — one-third more than it had expected.

On average, patients seen at the urgent-care clinic are treated and released within three hours. Patients to be admitted to the hospital have a “dwell” time (time to be evaluated and to get a room assignment) of just under nine hours.

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The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) offers additional funding for some programs and will provide access to insurance for many who don’t currently have it. But even those benefits won’t outweigh the hidden costs in some states.

States like Massachusetts and Wisconsin, which have relatively few uninsured residents due to expanded state programs, stand to gain significantly: Their additional outlay of funds will be minimal, and they’ll still be eligible for billions in federal funds.

Other states like Alabama and Texas, with many more uninsured residents and limited Medicaid coverage, face significant costs getting everyone covered — millions more are  now eligible.

For example, to help close a budget deficit, Arizona slashed insurance coverage for 350,000 residents just in the past month. Under PPACA, those people will be back on the insurance rolls — and the state has to foot the bill.

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