Marin General Hospital has won an additional $11 million from Sutter Health Corporation in a long-running arbitration, on top of $21.5 million awarded last August. Judge Rebecca Westerfield, the court-appointed arbitrator in the case, awarded the extra $11 million to cover attorneys' fees and pre-judgement interest. Last June, Westerfield awarded Marin General $21.5 million in a dispute over whether Sutter illegally skimmed more than $100 million in revenue from the hospital in the years before it turned control of Marin General back to the Marin Healthcare District in mid-2010. Two months later, the arbitration judge ruled that Marin General was the ‘prevailing party’ in the arbitration, and was due attorneys' fees and other costs from Sutter.

Sutter Health Corporation announced the appointment of Stephen Nolte as chief executive officer of company's recently announced health plan, currently in development. Nolte, 52, begins his role December 31, 2012. Since 2010, Nolte has served as principal vice president for health and human services consulting for OptumInsight (formerly Ingenix Consulting). After being licensed by the state, the company expected HMO products would first become available in the greater Sacramento and Central Valley regions in 2014. The company will also seek the DMHC's approval to extend the HMO's service area to other parts of Sutter's service area. Sutter Health expects to begin marketing products in the fall of 2013.

Sutter Health Corporation announced that it will consolidate 1,000 back-office jobs at a new shared services center in Roseville was good news for the region on three fronts. First, it nearly cancels out the loss of jobs last month from layoffs at Comcast and closure of Campbell Soup Co.'s South Sacramento plant. Many - if not most - of those Sutter jobs are likely to come from outside of the four-county area. It also takes a bite out of the region's formidable office-vacancy rate, filling a big building occupied years ago by Hewlett Packard Co. The 10-year lease is for 295,000 square feet. And it delivers a tremendous boost to Roseville, a city that has been particularly hard hit by the office downturn. The new employees will be looking for places to live and places to shop. The move will bring Sutter's workforce in Roseville to about 2,650, and make it the third employer behind Kaiser Permanente, at 4,430, and HP, at an estimated 3,200. Sutter's presence on the HP campus could expand further if another building is constructed on some 60 acres that is vacant. Those 1,000 Sutter employees could become 3,000 some day. Sutter said on October 10, 2012 the move would occur over the next 18 months. Some administrative functions will remain at the health system's 26 Northern California hospitals, but many will be shifted to the new Roseville center as Sutter continues efforts to operate more cost efficiently under the constraints of federal health reform. Services to be consolidated include financial services, hospital patient pre-services, registration, health information management, billing and collections. The net number of new jobs for the Sacramento region is unclear because some existing local jobs will consolidate there, too. The new center, located at 9100 Foothills Blvd. in west Roseville, will open in early 2013. Tenant improvements will begin immediately and the first group of 200 to 300 employees will move into the facility in the first quarter of next year. Additional employees will follow in phases. The lease has an option to expand the site to accommodate more workers, if needed in the future. The consolidation plan is not unusual, as health systems try to operate more efficiently - and cheaply - in a changing industry. Sacramento's reputation as a good market for back-office work has prompted Dignity Health to move about 250 back office jobs in San Mateo, Redding and Glendale to a new, consolidated office in Rancho Cordova. The first employees moved in late last month. Adventist Health plans to consolidate back-office billing and collection jobs currently performed at all 19 hospitals into three or four regions hubs from Southern California to the Pacific Northwest.