Everybody’s business

Crow to go?
Another “mysterious business for sale” had been revealed through a check of the Web site www.bizben.com.

Based on its description, this upscale bar and restaurant can be none other than the Black Crow Grill & Taproom at 209 Salem St.

Jeff Anderson, a chef and one of the business’s four owners, said there’s no hurry to sell, and in fact the Crow has always been for sale to the right buyer for the right price.

“We’re certainly not trying to get out of the Chico market,” Anderson said. “We love Chico.”

But with a bustling bakery business and a few “great restaurant concepts we want to roll out,” Anderson said the owners, who also run the Rawbar, wanted to keep their options open by posting information about the Crow on the Internet.

The asking price, which doesn’t include the leased property, is $795,000. The ad boasts gross sales of nearly $1.9 million a year, with a 16.5 percent adjusted net profit in 2003.

Hero hospital
Enloe Medical Center is one of only six hospitals in California—88 nationwide—to receive an award for Excellence in Patient Safety from Health Grades, Inc., an independent, for-profit healthcare quality corporation.

Health Grades collected the data from Medicare and patient release files, and placed Enloe in the top 2 percent of hospitals based on 13 of 20 patient safety indicators. They include things such as: postoperative respiratory failure, postoperative sepsis and leaving a foreign body in a patient following a procedure (“Hey, where’d I put that sponge?”).

The company’s Web site, www.healthgrades.com, goes into more detail on performance with something called Hospital Report Cards.

For example, Enloe excelled with a five-star rating in the area of partial hip replacement but scored only one star—poor—in the categories of one-month mortality from bowel obstruction, stroke and respiratory infection.

Feather River Hospital in Paradise scored five stars in the 6-months mortality category for bowel obstruction, but garnered only one star for obstetrics—something I noted because that’s where I’m scheduled to deliver my baby in October.

Ann Prater, public relations director for Enloe, said the methodology on the report cards is different from that used for the patient safety award, and can be a little misleading.

“I can grimace when I see one star and celebrate when I see five stars,” said Prater, who said a lower rating could just mean the hospital didn’t correctly record how sick a patient was, throwing off the mortality prediction and skewing the 2-year-old data.

What did I just say?
Yes, I’m having a baby in October. I won’t go on and on about it, because this is a business column, and I won’t be putting the baby to work until he’s at least 6 months old and can start pulling his own weight in this family.

In the meantime, we’re taking suggestions on names. It has to be a boy name, because it’s a boy and I don’t want him to have any more of a complex than he’s already destined for, being my kid and all.

If we pick a name submitted by a reader, he or she will receive a free copy of the Chico News & Review.