COVID surges show hospitals learned by doing | Mighty merger out west | Will doctors vote? | Top flu-fighting states

Leaders of some large hospital systems are lately showing they’ve learned how to cope with wildly fluctuating strains on resources while keeping their doors open for profitable service lines.

In the American Northwest and upper Midwest, a digitally progressive health system that operates 24 hospitals is moving to merge with one that specializes in rural care delivery and operates in 24 states and 10 countries.

Physicians who lived in three of the most populous states and were eligible to vote from 2006 to 2018 did so at a rate 14 percentage points lower than the population as a whole.

The three states of Southern New England will be looking for a threepeat of sorts this year, as they placed first, second and third for the 2019-20 season.  

U.S. physicians favor the idea of a two-tiered healthcare system, one in which a single-payer option peacefully coexists with private coverage. Their least favorite model? Single-payer Medicare for All.

Several large hospital systems in Southern California appear to have been dodging their duties to uninsured COVID patients.

The letter comes after a scathing Washington Post investigation, detailing how the Stanford senior fellow has allegedly pushed “junk science” to fight COVID-19. 

Prior studies focused on myocardial injury had not included much, if any, insight into medical imaging data, making the results less helpful to clinicians.

The bytes are accumulating far too fast for any human effort to connect whatever dots might be hiding in the massive muddle. Enter 40 researchers at 11 sites armed with AI and almost $18 million in new NIH funding.

The novel coronavirus has shown a nasty penchant for targeting the kidneys, and physicians can’t always tell which patients will need dialysis until they do. By then it’s often too late to save a life.