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California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra disclosed Tuesday that his office is investigating whether the Catholic healthcare chain Providence Health has violated its legal commitments by applying religious restrictions on care at one of Orange County’s premier hospitals.
Becerra’s office is requesting a heap of documentation from Providence about its dealings with Hoag Memorial Hospital, a Newport Beach medical center with which it has partnered since 2016 and is now in an acrimonious dispute.
It comes as Becerra awaits Senate confirmation of his nomination as President Biden’s secretary of Health and Human Services.
Becerra’s action follows a confidential complaint that several doctors at Hoag filed with his office in October.
In a recent study funded and coauthored by the company, the EaseVRx program outperformed a non-interactive headset app across several self-reported pain and pain-interference measures.
Good morning and welcome to the TimesOC newsletter. It’s Wednesday, Feb. 24. I’m Carol Cormaci, an editor new to this rotation with my colleagues, editor John Canalis and reporter Ben Brazil, to bring you the latest roundup of Orange County happenings.
It’s great news that, as of Saturday, Orange County hospitals had reported seeing a 45% reduction of COVID-19 patients arriving at their doorsteps over the previous two weeks. But the fits and starts of getting the vaccines to as many in the U.S. as possible, a promise most recently hindered by transportation issues caused by last week’s extreme weather conditions across the country’s heart, have been dispiriting to many.
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Hoag Memorial Hospital, the most respected medical institution in Orange County, has been affiliated with the giant Catholic hospital chain Providence Health since 2016. But you wouldn’t know it from Providence’s publicity materials.
The chain removed Hoag’s three facilities from its website listing of Southern California locations sometime in late October or early November. But that was just one of several actions Providence, which is based in Renton, Wash., has taken against Hoag.
In June, Providence terminated Hoag’s specialists from St. Joseph Heritage Healthcare, its network of medical providers for managed care plans in Southern California. According to USC healthcare expert Glenn Melnick, who has been consulting with Hoag officials, Providence didn’t inform patients of the change until late November, giving them little time to find new specialists before they had to choose their healthcare plans for 2021.