The broader market is having a so-so day but hospital stocks are posting nice gains, with CHS shares up about 5 percent and LifePoint adding more than 3 percent. There doesn’t appear to be a major news catalyst, although Fitch Ratings did include some mildly optimistic commentary about operators in its second-quarter health care industry overview.

Despite decreasing government reimbursement and the weak economy’s negative affects on patient utilization, profitability among the for-profit hospitals continues to be strong, supported by a low cost-inflation environment, cost-cutting and -containment efforts, and continued strong commercial insurer reimbursement trends.

Local health care technology firm Entrada today officially announced the close of its Series A funding round, which brings the company’s total equity financing to nearly $3 million.

Entrada CEO Bill Brown told NashvillePost.com in July that funding from Clayton Associates’ FCA Venture Partners helped round out the $2 million round, with investors having the opportunity to plug an extra $700,000 into the business.

Today’s announcement also includes mention of Silicon Valley Bank providing the Brentwood-based business with debt financing. Local venture capital firm Claritas Capital invested in Entrada in March.

ECOtality, the Arizona-based company that’s leading the development of Tennessee’s network of electric car charging stations, has tapped Bovis Lend Lease to manage their installation. Bovis, a division of Lend Lease Corp., also will oversee the putting in place of some stations elsewhere in the country.

“Bovis Lend Lease brings to this project the construction experience critical to the nationwide success of The EV Project,” said Don Karner, President of ECOtality North America. “We look forward to collaborating on leading the large-scale rollout of EV charging stations across the United States as we begin to lay the foundation for consumer EV adoption.”

Jeff Woods digs a little deeper into the personalities and possible motivations behind the Dean administration’s deal with hotel developer Robert Rowling and finds some folks wondering if Gaylord CEO Colin Reed showed up alone to a tag team match.

Another insider says: “Nobody’s said it publicly of course, but it looks like Omni came in here with such a good deal in Nashville just to screw with Reed. The fact that Rowling owns it is going to stick in Colin Reed’s craw. At the end of the day, Reed’s just going to have to eat it.”

Randall Forsyth passes along word from two notable economists that the economy is losing steam faster than it was just a few weeks ago.

While showing no new deterioration, shipping companies remain down sharply from their recent peak. Truckers‘ readings are also relatively lackluster. So, all sectors of the transports are either weak or weakening, hardly a positive portent for the economy.

The Federal Trade Commission has granted Vanguard Health Systems an early end to the waiting period required by law as part of its planned acquisition of Detroit Medical Center. Next is up a nod from the Michigan AG; Vanguard officials are aiming to wrap up the $1.5 billion by the end of October.

Baptist Hospital and Sarah Cannon Research Institute both are listed on Modern Healthcare magazine’s recently-released ‘Best Places to Work in Healthcare’ list.

For now, the 100-company list is arranged alphabetically. The trade publication will reveal a ranked list at an event in October.

The selection is based on information collected from the employer employees of health care companies with at least 25 employees in areas including leadership and planning, culture and communications, work environment, training and development, pay and benefits, and more.

Northumberland, Pa.-based Keystone Insurers Group will expand into the Tennessee market early next year. The privately held company, with more than 215 franchise partners in six states, is owned by its employees and partners in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky.

Executive Vice President Colin Buzzard, in announcing Keystone’s expansion, said, “We anticipate launching Tennessee in the first quarter of 2011 with around 15 ‘pioneer’ partners. That select group will set the direction for Keystone in Tennessee and will dictate future partner opportunities. We place great confidence in that initial group.”

The company has property and casualty premiums totaling more than $1.4 billion.

Advance Financial, the locally based provider of payday advances and other consumer finance services, has hired Cullen Earnest to be its vice president of public policy and communications. Earnest is a former Bredesen administration official who worked at the Tennessee Department of Financial Institutions and the Bureau of TennCare, among others, before rejoining the private sector in the summer of 2009.

SEE ALSO: The City Paper 2009 profile of Advance Financial’s evolution

AT&T Inc. invested nearly $200 million in its Tennessee wireless and wireline networks, the company announced this morning:

Upgrades to the AT&T wireless network included new cell sites, expanded mobile broadband coverage and increased 3G capacity. The investment also included upgrades to the AT&T wireline infrastructure, such as expanded AT&T U-verse services, additional AT&T Wi-Fi Hot Spots, and extended reach of broadband services.

AT&T customers are seeing the results of this investment with faster mobile broadband speeds and strong reliability, according to the latest round of comprehensive drive testing by Global Wireless Solutions Inc. (GWS). This GWS testing showed that AT&T maintained the nation’s fastest mobile broadband network, connected more than 98 percent of calls on the first attempt, and carried 98.65 percent of calls to completion, a difference of less than one call out of 1,000 from the only higher-scoring provider.

Over the past three years the company has invested $1 billion to improve its Tennessee networks.

Tennessee is one of six states that will receive a network of electric vehicle charging stations over the next year as part of The EV Project.

One reason to get excited about it — beyond the fact that you’ll have a place to plug in your car if you’re just itching to buy a Leaf — is the fact that your experience will be part of a wide-ranging study that will be used to design an eventual national electric vehicle infrastructure.

At the Tennessee Valley Authority’s forum yesterday, stakeholders from a variety of organizations discussed the variety of unknowns they’re hoping to cross off their lists after gathering data on consumer use of electric cars. As Stephanie Cox, local area manager for ECOtality, put it — the Project will provide the Department of Energy, its major funding source, with best practices and lessons learned.

For example, Nissan’s Leaf is equipped with technology to send information on your car’s performance to a central data center for analysis and send you reports summarizing your charging activities. In addition, EV Project partners will study things like how to provide consumers with charging station locations (think smart phone apps), how people who live in apartments or condos charge their cars in the absence of a garage-based charging station, what happens when a number of vehicles are plugged in at one location, and more.

In that sense, Tennesseans will not only be “pioneers” in that they’ll be among the first owners of electric cars — we’ll also be helping to build the framework for EV adoption across the country.

Two senior Tractor Supply executives have cashed in some of their options and netted a combined $1.3 million. Store operations chief Stan Ruta exercised a batch of options granted him in early 2006 and sold them for a profit of more than $1 million. CFO Tony Crudele wasn’t quite as aggressive: He exercised 12,000 options he earned almost two years for a gain of about $200,000.

Universal Health Services announced it is canceling upcoming investor conference appearances as it focuses on closing its acquisition of Franklin-based Psychiatric Solutions Inc. and prepares for financing some financing transactions.

In addition, Psych Solutions (Ticker: PSYS) filed its proxy with the Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday, soliciting shareholder votes in favor of the deal and setting a shareholder meeting date on October 5.

Pennsylvania-based UHS (Ticker: UHS) in announced the more than $3 billion transaction in May. Get the background on the deal at this link and this one.