Healthcare workers in search of new jobs may want to head to Houston.

Glassdoor’s 2024 Best Places to Work list, which was released in January and comprises 100 companies across a variety of industries, included just three hospitals—MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston Methodist, and Texas Children’s—and they’re all located in Houston’s Texas Medical Center. Experts say the combination of world-class medical facilities and competitive employee benefits make Houston one of the best cities for healthcare professionals to live in and work.

“Houston is the global leader in healthcare because of the Texas Medical Center,” Shibu Varghese, SVP of people, culture, and infrastructure at MD Anderson, said. “When people have a passion for healthcare and they’re thinking about employers […] a place to go is Houston.”

Keep reading here.—MA, KP

Do you work in healthcare or have information about the industry that we should know? Email Maia at [email protected]. For confidential conversations, ask Maia for her number on Signal.

Quick history lesson: Quality management systems (QMS) have historically been managed as a system of instructors, teaching each function how to interact. Now, the FDA’s Drug Shortages report presents a new challenge for pharmaceutical companies: Create a model that maintains quality and compliance.

That’s where NSF’s Quality Maturity Management (QMM) Assessment Model comes in. The QMM model aligns with the FDA’s findings, so pharmaceutical and biotech companies can become (and stay) compliant.

The FDA report requires drug manufacturers to have consistent, reliable processes that can be scaled and improved. In the case study, NSF experts dig into how they’ve already done it with a leading pharmaceutical company.

Learn how they deployed QMM.

Black Medicaid enrollees are more likely than their white counterparts—even those with low incomes and disabilities—to be hospitalized for preventable health events relating to heart failure, diabetes, and asthma/chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), according to a new analysis.

Nonprofit think tank Urban Institute researchers, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, looked at preventable hospitalizations—or inpatient stays that could have been avoided with “timely and high-quality” primary care—among roughly 5 million Medicaid enrollees across 21 states between 2018 and 2019.

The researchers found that overall, enrollees with disabilities and incomes that qualified them for Medicaid via Supplemental Security Income (SSI) status faced higher rates of preventable hospitalizations than non-SSI enrollees for health failure (9.4% versus 5.2%), diabetes (4.0% versus 2.5%), and asthma/COPD (3.4% versus 1.1%). Though, the researchers wrote in the analysis, enrollees with a disability may already “be at an increased risk of hospitalization because of underlying health conditions associated with their disability.”

Keep reading here.—SY

Do you work in healthcare or have information about the industry that we should know? Email Shannon at [email protected]. For confidential conversations, ask Shannon for her number on Signal.

An estimated 100,000 additional New York residents could soon enroll in the state’s Essential Plan—which provides health insurance to lower-income individuals who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid—thanks to a federal government-backed eligibility expansion, Governor Kathy Hochul announced Monday.

The US departments of Health and Human Services and Treasury approved New York’s request to extend eligibility for the public health insurance program to individuals with incomes up to 250% of the federal poverty line (FPL), or about $37,650 annually. The expansion—up from 200% of FPL, or a $30,000 annual income for one person—will take effect April 1 and continue through 2028.

The governor’s office said the expanded eligibility is expected to save newly eligible New York residents an average of $4,700 per year compared to coverage they would have purchased through qualified health plans offered on the state’s health insurance exchange. Hochul called the move “an important step toward building a better healthcare system statewide.”

Keep reading here.—SY

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