Solantic, a chain of walk-in clinics, and Baptist Health of Northeast Florida co-branded an urgent care network in Jacksonville. [Photo: Eileen Escarda]

• In Jacksonville, the CEOs of all the local hospitals gather once a month to talk about hospital-related concerns, from caring for the uninsured to drug diversion issues. Dr. William Rupp, CEO of Mayo Clinic Florida, says the roundtables are unusual, but he expects the conversations, as well as other types of collaborative arrangements among hospitals, will become the norm. "I see a lot more cooperation and working together as healthcare goes forward. I think it's going to be a good decade before we work out all of the new implications of the (federal) healthcare legislation, and everybody is struggling with delivering new models of care that's high quality and less expensive."

• Earlier this year, All Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg became part of Johns Hopkins Medicine, making it the first hospital outside of the Baltimore/Washington region to become part of the prestigious institution. The merger provides All Children's with expanded teaching and research opportunities and gives Johns Hopkins a foothold in Florida and markets in the Caribbean and Central and South America.

• Last year, Baptist Health of Northeast Florida teamed up with Solantic, a walk-in urgent-care clinic company co-founded by Florida Gov. Rick Scott, to create a co-branded urgent care network in the Jacksonville area.

Physicians at Cleveland Clinic will serve as medical director for 12 MinuteClinics in select CVS stores in Broward and Palm Beach counties. [Photo: Minute Clinic]

This summer, Cleveland Clinic of Florida joined forces with MinuteClinic, CVS Caremark's retail healthcare division. With 500 MinuteClinics in 25 states, CVS Caremark's is the largest retail healthcare provider in the nation. Under the new agreement, family physicians from Cleveland Clinic will serve as medical director for 12 MinuteClinic medical clinics in select CVS stores in Broward and Palm Beach counties and will provide clinic consultation to the nurse practitioners that staff those clinics.

In June, Take Care Health Systems, a Walgreens subsidiary that operates Take Care Clinics at 350 Walgreens drugstores across the nation, formed a relationship with Jacksonville-based Memorial Health. Memorial Health-affiliated physicians will provide information about Take Care Clinics to their patients and families if their own office is closed or they are unable to schedule an appointment for a patient as quickly as the patient would like. Likewise, providers at Take Care Clinics will educate patients about Memorial Health services and other local healthcare resources.

In Brevard County, Wuesthoff Health System operates the Clinic at Walmart at two Walmart locations, one in Cocoa and one on Merritt Island, with plans for more.

• Scientists at the Vaccine & Gene Therapy Institute in Port St. Lucie are collaborating with nearby Martin Memorial Hospital to conduct research aimed at developing vaccines and therapies for infectious disease, cancer and immune disease. One of the studies involved collecting blood samples of consenting Martin Memorial patients who had the flu. Researchers used the samples to examine how the body's immune calls react to exposure to a viral infection such as the flu, either by immunization or by being infected with the flu itself.