Ascension (healthcare system) – Wikipedia

In 1999, the Daughters of Charity National Health System and Sisters of St. Joseph Health System merged to create Ascension Health, which was later renamed to Ascension; over the years, various other hospitals and clinics joined the system.[2]

In 2014, the company partnered in opening the $2b Health City Cayman Islands project,[5] and sold its stake in 2017.[6]

In April 2016, a class-action lawsuit was brought in federal court, alleging that Ascension subsidiary Wheaton Franciscan Services (in Glendale, Wisconsin), erred by treating its pension plan as though it was a "church plan," exempt from the Employee Retirement Income Security Act ("ERISA"), a federal law governing employee pensions. In January, 2018, the parties announced a settlement, in which Ascension would pay $29.5 million to the plaintiffs.[7]

In December 2018, the Attorney General of the District of Columbia brought suit against Ascension in an attempt to prevent its closure of Providence Health System hospital, which served a low-income population, and had failed financially. The suit alleged that the closure was in violation of the hospital's license.[8] Though the D.C. city council passed an ordinance giving the Mayor the power to block the closing, the suit ultimately failedwith the Council blamed by the judge for acting too slowlyand the hospital closed.[9]

In February, 2020, a jury awarded obstetrician/gynecologist Rebecca Denman, MD, $4.75 million in damages by an Indiana jury, after suing Ascension's St. Vincent Carmel Hospital and its St. Vincent Medical Group for defamation and fraud. The lawsuit arose from a December 2017 incident, in which Denman was accused of smelling like alcohol while on duty. Denman contended that she had been cheated out of the due process, as provided in the company substance-abuse policy, depriving her of a chance to establish her innocence, and retain her position.[10][11]

In October 2021, Ascension and AdventHealth announced the planned dissolution of their joint venture AMITA in 2022. Each system will retain the hospitals they originally contributed to the partnership. [12]

In 2018, controversy swirled around an announcement by Ascension and Google, that they had agreed to share information on millions of Ascension patients. The project, internally known as "Project Nightingale," involved analyzing health dataincluding lab results, medications, and diagnoses of Ascension patientsto use Google's artificial intelligence resources to recommend changes in a patient's care (different diagnostic tests, treatment plans, or additional physicians) and flag unexpected deviations in that care. The announcement sparked a probe by the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which enforces the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the principal law governing the privacy of patient records in the United States.[13][14][15][16] It also sparked inquiries by three U.S. Senators.[17]

Google and Ascension officials defended the program as beneficial.[18][19] Google Cloud president Tariq Shaukat posted a blog note asserting that Ascension health data would not be combined with consumer data, nor would it be used beyond the scope of Google's contract with Ascensionbut the actual scope of that contract remained rather unclear. Shaukat wrote that the project includes moving Ascension's computing infrastructure to the Google cloud, as well as providing unspecified tools that would enable doctors and nurses to improve care.[20]

Privacy advocates, howeveralong with cybertechnology and healthcare information technology expertswarned that Project Nightingale's risks to patient privacy may be massive, with the patient records tagged by patient name and date of birth, potentially allowing a direct correlation with other records in Google's vast database, for "other" uses outside the very limited protections of HIPAA.[13][20][21][22]

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Ascension (healthcare system) - Wikipedia