Reimbursement
A new poll from the Ponemon Institute has found that security preparedness is still sorely lacking across healthcare – a fact that could leave unsuspecting organizations "blindsided" by breaches.
Medicare physicians will get smacked with a 24 percent payment cut on Jan. 1, 2014, unless Congress takes action. So it's not surprising that healthcare industry associations are publicly calling for an end to the payment mechanism that will effectively slash their reimbursement.
To not only survive in but also successfully adapt to a reformed healthcare marketplace, insurers are taking varied diversification paths -- some of them betting against history.
Concentrated economic power, combined with fee-for-service incentives, has made healthcare "the least consumer-friendly" U.S. industry and enabled arbitrary and capricious price gouging, according to the man behind Time magazine's "Bitter Pill" feature.
University Hospitals has signed a new accountable care collaboration with Cigna that will enhance care coordination and reduce costs and reach some 10,000 people covered by the company's health plan and who receive care from the 1,500 primary care physicians and specialists employed by UH.
Among the biggest obstacles in getting health plan members to comparison shop is the popular notion that "you get what you pay for" -- because it's actually true in most other industries.
Although the country's longstanding problem of inadequate healthcare access may be solved by the Affordable Care Act, the investigator behind Time's "Bitter Pill" thinks the law will at best make only modest gains towards its namesake principle of affordability.
New research suggests that healthcare organizations can lower their readmission rates and improve patient care simply by using oral nutritional supplements as part of an overall patient care protocol.
If it feels like there are more federal compliance requirements for health plan staff these days, it's because there are -- from exchanges to HIPAA to Medicaid to Medicare Medicare Advantage.
Health plans are increasingly using mobile health to engage its customers, but Molina Healthcare in Utah has gone a step further by providing the use of free cell phones to eligible Medicaid members so they can receive text message-based health services and be more involved in their care.