Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield officials have extended their contract with Healthways' SilverSneakers fitness program. About 120,000 Medicare enrollees in the Natural State now have access to SilverSneakers through 2015.

D.C.-based Privia Health, which boasts a wealth of Nashville roots, announced Monday it has just closed a $12.3 million series B funding round. Privia CEO Jeff Butler, who previously spent time with local household names HCA and LifePoint, is building a wellness and care management venture that partners with physician groups. Another local connection: One of the company’s investors is John Deane with Nashville-based Southwind.

Medicare Advantage insurer HealthSpring has contracted with Minnesota-based Warm Health to provide care management services to its members with higher risk for heart failure. Mark Tulloch, COO of HealthSpring, says Warm Health's "business model delivers rich clinical content that affords our clinicians the ability to better provide optimal quality care and oversight." The program has been rolled in four regions of HealthSpring's footprint, which now covers 11 states and D.C.

A few months ago, Franklin-based wellness and disease management company Healthways announced a company-wide restructuring that ultimately ended up costing the company more than $10 million. The company wouldn't say just how many workers were affected by the cuts, which included the loss of some international and local positions.

Browsing through Healthways' recent annual reports, however, can give readers a general sense of what's been happening with the employee ranks of Healthways over the last few years.

As of March 1, the company had 2,800 workers. On March 8, 2010, that number was 3,000. On Oct. 15, 2008, it was 3,500 people. In October of 2007 it was 3,800. (Search "employees" in each filing.)

That's a 26 percent decline in employee count in the last three and a half years.

“While previous studies have demonstrated a reduction in readmissions based on the capacity of hospitals and clinics to provide supplemental discharge counseling, this study demonstrates that the same effect can be achieved through efficiently scaled and delivered telephonic interventions,” said James E. Pope, M.D., Chief Science Officer, Healthways. “These findings clearly indicate that timely discharge follow-up by telephone to supplement standard care is effective at reducing near-term hospital readmissions, thus providing a means of reducing costs for health plans and their members.”