💉 Checking the Pulse 05/13/26

As a reader of this newsletter, you’ve likely noticed periodic developments about PeaceHealth’s legal battle in Oregon surrounding the state’s corporate practice of medicine law.

Given that the case with national ramifications reached a climax in court last week, today’s newsletter is a special edition: a Q&A with Ashli Blow, the local environment and health reporter for Lookout Eugene-Springfield, who has extensively covered the saga from the beginning.

Q: Patients, staff and community members aren’t a monolith, so can you explain the relationships the Eugene and Springfield communities have with PeaceHealth? Do their interactions with the large employer, provider and community organization fall into any notable thematic buckets?

A: PeaceHealth is expecting 80,000 visits this year to its RiverBend emergency department in Springfield. This emergency department serves both Springfield and Eugene, because Eugene doesn’t have an emergency department. You read that right, the second-largest city in Oregon doesn’t have an emergency department.

And then we have people like Karen Stapleton, who was a plaintiff in the case. She’s a parent whose child has diabetes and has faced life-threatening issues with organ failure before. They rely on consistent emergency care. But through these individual experiences is a collective community that turns to the hospital for care. Plaintiff Dan McGee said it well when testifying on the stand:

“We are not just doctors, we are members of the community … We live and die in the same hospitals as everybody else … When I talk about ‘our,’ I talk about ‘our’ hospital, and ‘our’ community.”

Q: Your reporting on PeaceHealth and Oregon's corporate practice of medicine law has received national attention of late. Can you explain the arc of developments regarding PeaceHealth, ApolloMD and Eugene Emergency Physicians?

A: It is indeed a large arc. In terms of a potential violation of the law, many of the developments over the last few months are tangential to the case. The broader story is that in February, Dr. Jim McGovern, chief hospital executive of PeaceHealth’s Oregon network, announced the hospital would not renew the contract with Eugene Emergency Physicians, also called EEP, but instead award it to Georgia-based ApolloMD.

In the weeks that followed, EEP doctors publicly came forward in an interview with me about conditions at RiverBend and said none of the group’s 41 medical professionals would work under ApolloMD for at least 90 days. In early April, I went on to receive emails that allegedly showed McGovern inappropriately tried to influence patient care. He has an administrative license and can’t make care decisions like those with an active medical license on the emergency department floor. He has since been placed on leave. Documentation also showed that EEP doctors raised concerns about McGovern’s behavior, and rather than action, came a process to procure new emergency department services.

Meanwhile, attorneys for EEP were developing a case that ApolloMD’s proposed setup was in violation of Oregon’s new law on corporate medicine. This law is so new that everyone is still calling it a Senate bill. Gov. Tina Kotek signed Senate Bill 951 into law about a year ago, in June.

The law is designed to close a loophole that allowed businesses to essentially disguise themselves as a physician-owned practice. This can happen by putting one or two practicing physicians at the top, but in reality, there are administrators really making the calls. This is exactly what EEP believed ApolloMD was doing, specifically through ApolloMD creating a new practice called Lane Emergency Physicians.

After more than 30 hours in court, U.S. District Court Judge Mustafa Kasubhai told attorneys from the bench that the setup appeared to be a “shell game.” He hasn’t made an official ruling, and it’s to be seen if he will. That’s because PeaceHealth and EEP came to an overnight agreement to renew their contract. The details are still being fleshed out.

Q: What was PeaceHealth's argument in court?

A: They believe that the lawsuit had no standing, and wanted it to be dismissed. Whether there will be an actual ruling is something to be seen in the coming weeks.

Q: As a local health reporter, what was it like reporting on health care from inside the courtroom?

A: I went in knowing that there was a lot that I was not going to understand from the bench. I sat in the middle of the courtroom so that I could observe people's reactions from the gallery, and I took notes on how many people responded to certain conversations being had between attorneys and witnesses, and the judge. That’s how I took notes about important moments.

To hear more from Blow about her months of reporting on this case, you can watch her explain it in this 12-minute video.

STAT: While Blow chronicled PeaceHealth’s Oregon troubles in a traditional newspaper/reporting style, the social media comedian doctor, Dr. Glaucomflecken (Will Flanary), documented most developments on social media. He discusses his work on the latest Stat podcast.

Hard Fork: Next time you’re at the dentist, you may want to ask if the practice uses artificial intelligence, as new reporting indicated that AI use in the dental industry is widespread and that at some practices, AI is promoting unnecessary dental procedures to the financial benefit of the company.

The Atlantic: Via this gift link, a doctor from the PNW who was on board the Hantavirus-struck cruise discusses how his birding trip turned into him becoming “the doctor on this boat.”