By Geert De Lombaerde - Nashville Post
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is accusing Saint Thomas Health’s Murfreesboro hospital of violating civil rights laws by requiring an employee of a vendor to have a flu shot over his religious beliefs.
In a lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, the EEOC says Saint Thomas had in 2013 and 2014 accommodated the wishes of the employee of food and environmental services provider TouchPoint Support Services. But a year later, Saint Thomas Murfreesboro officials denied his request to forego the shot (and instead use a protective mask) and said he could no longer work at the facility without it. The agency is calling for the health system to pay back wages as well as damages.
Saint Thomas officials declined to comment on the lawsuit.
Saint Thomas executives this week announced that the health system will add Ascension to its name as its parent organization continues to unify its brand across the country.
The move comes with a new logo for Saint Thomas, which has been a part of Ascension since 1999. Nationally, Ascension runs 2,600 sites of care and employs 34,000 providers.
“The Ascension Saint Thomas brand is an expression and extension of our more than 120-year history serving Middle Tennessee, with a Mission to provide compassionate, personalized care for all, especially those most vulnerable,” said Tim Adams, president and CEO of Saint Thomas Health. “By connecting our Saint Thomas legacy of quality, faith-based care to our identity as Ascension, we will establish a national reputation that supports our goals of expanding access to care, bringing care closer to home, growing innovation within our specialized services and improving patient outcomes.”
HCA Healthcare’s Georgia hospitals have narrowly avoided falling outside the BlueCross BlueShield of Georgia network.
WTOC Channel 11 in Savannah reports that about 2 million people were temporarily in coverage limbo this week as the two parties hammered out a new agreement to replace a deal that had expired Sunday. HCA, which runs 15 hospitals and surgery centers in the Peach State, and BlueCross did reach a solution Wednesday and backdated their agreement to Monday morning.
Local attorney Roy Wyman and his colleagues at regional law firm Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough have rolled out a technology tool to help health care providers more efficiently comply with patient data privacy and security regulations.
HIPAA2Z is a flat-fee service that streamlines the compliance process with customized risk assessments, management plans and other tools to ensure compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and let vendors also be secure and compliant.
"By combining security and legal services, HIPAA2Z offers everything you need to know, and do, to comply with HIPAA and to be more secure in handling data," said Wyman, who is one of 22 people based in Nelson Mullins’ Nashville office. "By standardizing and automating HIPAA compliance, we reduce the cost, hassle and time required to feel confident about protecting health information and complying with the law."