A Medical Device Daily

National HealthCare Corporation (NHC; Murfreesboro, Tennessee) an operator of senior care services reported that it has reached a management agreement with McKendree Health Center’s McKendree Village (both Nashville, Tennessee) effective Feb. 1. For the past several weeks, NHC has assisted the leadership of the McKendree Health Center in the areas of quality improvement and operational enhancement.

McKendree Village is a continuing care retirement community located on 42 acres in the Nashville suburb of Hermitage. In addition to the nursing care provided in the McKendree Health Center, McKendree Village offers assisted living services to residents in the 85-unit McKendree Manor, and independent senior care living in a 234-unit residential tower, and in 39 individually designed cottages.

NHC also operates 32 homecare programs, six independent living centers and assisted living centers at 22 locations.

In other agreements:

• Tenet Healthcare (Dallas) reported that it has signed a new multi-year agreement with Cigna (Bloomfield, Connecticut) including all of Tenet’s 54 acute care hospitals, outpatient centers and employed physicians.

The agreement includes a provision to include any new facilities that might be added to Tenet’s portfolio. With Cigna’s planned acquisition of Great-West Healthcare, Tenet now has all of its acute care hospitals included in the networks of both managed care companies.

“We are pleased that Cigna has agreed to expand our relationship with the addition of nine Tenet hospitals to their network,” said Stephen Newman, MD, Tenet’s chief operating officer. “With this expanded contract, we move incrementally closer to achieving our objectives for commercial volume growth.”

Sierra Providence Eastside Hospital, a 100-bed hospital in El Paso, Texas, will be added to the Cigna network when it opens in the first half of 2008.

“The new Cigna contract is consistent with our strategy of achieving full participation for all our facilities with managed care partners at competitive financial terms,” said Clint Hailey, Tenet’s chief managed care officer. “This agreement with Cigna represents a continuation of Tenet’s strategy that began in the summer of 2007 with our national agreement with Aetna and was continued with our national agreement with United Healthcare announced in November and now includes Cigna.”

Tenet Healthcare through its subsidiaries owns and operates acute care hospitals and related ancillary health care businesses, which include ambulatory surgery centers and diagnostic imaging centers.