Reimbursement

The ranks of American adults without health insurance is now 17.3 percent of the population, a rate that is the highest on record, according to a Gallup poll measuring uninsurance rates in the third quarter.

The United States spends the highest percentage of GDP in the world on healthcare, yet we have some of the highest rates of heart disease, obesity and infant mortality. We also have the shortest life expectancy compared to developed Western Europe, Japan, Australia and Canada. Clearly, what we're doing here isn't working and has resulted in an inefficient healthcare system with the highest costs in the world and disappointing clinical outcomes.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota has recently signed up eight large health systems under an aligned incentive model, a critical milestone in the health plan's strategy of fostering an accountable care organization.

A group of states and vendors focused on eliminating the barriers to sharing electronic health records have issued a set of technical specifications to standardize connections between providers, health information exchanges and other data-sharing partners.

On the same day voters in Ohio were summarily rejecting by a margin of nearly 2-to-1 the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act, justices at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia weighed in with a ruling upholding the mandate as constitutional.

A new survey from Anthelio finds that a majority of community hospitals report having low operating margins due to rising healthcare costs and lower Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement. Nonetheless, most hospitals surveyed are still working to put in place an array of health IT.

A new study from Rand Corp. of the PROMETHEUS Payment project shows that bundling payments to providers as a means to cut healthcare costs is proving harder to accomplish than originally anticipated.

New Hampshire has one of the oldest populations in the country. New Hampshire Public Radio recently hosted a newscast in which guests shared how Medicare's 'silver tsunami' could not only be economically devastating to the Granite State, but to the future of the healthcare structure.

Bundling payments to providers as a means to cut healthcare costs is proving harder to do than originally anticipated, according to a new study from non-profit research organization Rand Corp.