Nashville-based Hospice Compassus has agreed to provide money and periodically fly trained volunteers to the southern tip of South Africa to share medical expertise and best practice ideas with Cape Town-based Living Hope, which provides general health care as well as substance abuse treatment, homelessness care and HIV/AIDS treatment to a number of communities.

“Hospice work is humanitarian in nature. We have a calling to deliver compassionate care not only in our local communities, but also to those around the world. This partnership is a natural extension of our company’s mission and core values,” said David Andrews, senior vice president of business development and chief compliance officer for Hospice Compassus.

A panel of Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals judges has dismissed the case filed by former NASCAR driver Jeremy Mayfield (pictured) against the racing sanctioning body and Nashville-based drug testers Aegis Sciences. Mayfield had claimed a positive methamphetamine test in 2009 was incorrect. He is due in another North Carolina courthouse next month on four charges related to his alleged possession of meth and stolen materials.

As many of you may know, Magellan is a large, for profit, managed care organization who contracts with insurance plans such as BCBS of TN, Cigna, and others to "manage" people's insurance benefits for, among other things, alcohol and drug abuse treatment. During a patient's stay at Cumberland Heights, we are required to update the Magellan case management staff about progress in treatment, continuing needs to be addressed, and plans for discharge. Magellan then "authorizes" days of service for which the insurance company will pay. On June 29, 2010, we were notified that a Magellan team of reviewers were coming to Cumberland Heights on the very next day to review 25 randomly selected medical records. We were told that this was a routine follow up visit to some charting issues we had worked on during January and February. Although our records are electronic, they insisted on viewing them in paper form. In addition, they refused to allow a Cumberland Heights staff member to be present during the review to assist them with finding things. As a result, they did not find all of the available information on one case, leading them to draw a wrong conclusion about the patient's care and medication. In another case, they believed that a patient should have been sent out to a specialist physician during the first week of treatment, even though the patient would have been gone from Cumberland Heights by the time we were able to get the person in to see the specialist. There were a few other minor findings not important enough to mention here. We were told that they would get back to us after a July 14 committee meeting as to a plan to address these issues. On July 1, 2010, at around noon, we received a call saying that our contract with Magellan was being terminated immediately and that all of the patients currently in treatment had to be transferred out of Cumberland Heights to other facilities by the end of the day. Before we were even able to pull our staff together, Magellan case managers were calling our counseling team, demanding that patients be transferred, and saying that we had been removed from the network for "poor quality care." In addition, families of patients began to receive calls at home, saying that Cumberland Heights was no longer in the Magellan network. These families had the impression that something truly dreadful had happened at Cumberland Heights. Needless to say, this was extremely upsetting to our patients, all of whom wanted to stay and were afraid that they were going to be kicked out. Although we quickly reassured them that Cumberland Heights would do the right thing and that no patient would be leaving Cumberland Heights before they were safe to do so, it was still a total disruption to the focus of treatment — getting and staying sober.

"[Mayfield] can say whatever he wishes to say," Black said. "I think we're on very, very good ground. I'm very confident in the interpretation of the test and the action we took."