Not-for-profits up for grabs by the giants

Continuing the consolidation in healthcare, hospitals that for decades have been the cornerstones of the not-for-profit sector--teaching facilities, Catholic hospitals and other church-affiliated institutions--are for the first time considering deals with for-profit chains.     

Not-for-profits stash the cash

Like never before, not-for-profit hospitals are in the money. However, they expect their cash-rich positions will be battered by poorer government reimbursement, the demands of creating integrated systems, the growth of managed care and the Darwinian struggle for survival with investor-owned giants.     

Network basics for telemedicine

Early telemedicine networks employed dedicated telecommunications circuits (e.g. leased digital lines) in which the sender and receiver were connected by a private circuit. More recently, the Internet has become widely available for general use, including telemedicine. The Internet was engineered to permit network paths to be shared by all users, so data transmission is fundamentally different from traditional, circuit-switched networks. Early telemedicine applications demonstrated the feasibility of Internet Protocol transmission. The basic performance criteria to use in evaluating newer digital communications technologies that carry both voice and data are: (1) bandwidth; (2) packet loss; (3) end-to-end delay; (4) jitter; (5) privacy and security. Network engineering involves performance trade-offs between the hardware, architecture, security and the budget available. A telemedicine application may be running over a network whose design is entirely under the user's control, or the application may employ some part of the Internet whose design is unknown to the user. If an application is not running to satisfaction, then a network engineer should be consulted.     

Not-for-profits like the fit of former for-profits

Not-for-profit hospitals and systems are expanding market share through purchases of for-profit facilities that have come up for sale. As for-profits scale back their growth or divest properties to finance leveraged buy-outs, not-for-profits are there to add key markets that may not have been accessible otherwise.