Logistics giant OHL and the Nashville chapter of the Project Management Institute have teamed up to launch a series of gatherings for transportation industry professionals. The goal of the so-called "Community of Practice" is to network, share best practices and stay on top of the latest industry trends.

Global publisher Wolters Kluwer Health says it will market its Lippincott’s Professional Development Programs for nurses through locally based HealthStream's online learning platform. HealthStream already is offering other Lippincotts' nursing courses to its hospital client base.

Fred Lowrance at locally based Avondale Partners says Gaylord Entertainment "remains on track to achieve its lofty second half goals" even though there's some skepticism about the performance of the Washington, D.C., area, where the company runs its Gaylord National resort. But Lowrance says the property is likely to do better than the region as a whole, which will help drive momentum for the company (Ticker: GET) heading toward 2012.

We sense that some investors may have forgotten that prior year Opryland flood-related bookings adjustments wound up sending several groups to National (highest priced rooms in the GET system) at much lower Opryland rates — depressing 3Q’10 National rates. Any lingering softness is likely offset by robust Opryland performance as well as improving results at the Palms and Texan resorts.

Lowrance's Avondale colleague Richard Close is impressed with HealthStream's Q3 numbers — the momentum is "solid considering significant structural changes expected to occur in healthcare" — and says investors should consider taking advantage of today's pullback in the stock (Ticker: HSTM), which is due primarily to revenue coming in "only" in line with expectations. Close has reiterated his 'market outperform' rating and $17.50 price target.

The Tennessee and Indiana clinical pros at mental health care provider Centerstone can now get discounted access to the continuing education offerings from Cross Country Education per an agreement the two companies announced Tuesday. Cross Country produces more than 5,000 live seminars each year and this spring landed a big fish in Cigna.

PIMCO CEO Mohamed El-Erian says policymakers are ignoring the fact that unemployment in the United States is becoming an increasingly structural problem that will have wide-ranging social as well as economic repercussions. What's needed, he says, is a big investment push in education, retraining and safety net initiatives.

Left to its own devices, America’s unemployment problem will deepen. This will widen the already-large gap between the country’s haves and have-nots. It will undermine labor’s skills and productivity. It will accentuate the burden imposed on the gradually declining number of people who remain in the labor force and have jobs. And it will make it even harder to find a medium-term solution to America’s worsening public-debt and deficit dynamics.

Brentwood-based Cross Country Education has secured a contract to market its live and audio seminars to up to 64,000 employees of insurance giant Cigna. Cross Country President Greg Greene and his team have trained more than 1.5 million health care providers since 1995.

Labor is the real long-term issue around Medicare, Medicaid and other medical entitlements. Not share of GDP. Not the cost of medical technology or the price of drugs. You can bring down payments to drug and medical device companies and doctors all you want, but unless you dramatically increase the growth rate of ‘output per worker’ in healthcare, we will still end up in trouble. This is why ‘cost controls’ have failed to stem the rise of healthcare costs.

Even the growing ranks of the poor living in the suburbs tend to congregate in low-income neighborhoods where jobs are harder to come by. Yet car ownership rates are low among the poor, the authors say, and for those dependent on public transit the systems often offer sparse coverage. "You are really creating a society of people who don't know what work is like," says Robert Straits, director of the Employment Management Services Div. at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. "It's a generation of people who have never held a real job."