Healthcare Finance Staff

  Consumer-driven health plans (CDHPs) were offered by 58 percent of employers in 2011, making them the second most popular health benefits option for the first time, according to an Aon Hewitt survey of more than 2,000 employers.

Timothy Bickmore, associate professor at Northeastern University's College of Computer and Information Science, has been working for the past decade in the area of "relational agents." He says these artificially intelligent avatars are poised for a promising future in healthcare.

While most healthcare organizations are anxious to see what changes to the system healthcare reform will bring, executives at urban and safety-net hospitals are most concerned about the looming Medicare and Medicaid Disproportionate Share Hospital (DSH) payment cuts and the challenges these cuts will bring.

Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Rick Langfelder at Lutheran Medical Center, a 462-bed hospital located in Brooklyn, N.Y., spoke recently with Healthcare Finance News Associate Editor Kelsey Brimmer regarding the most pressing financial issues that many hospitals located in urban areas of the U.S. have been facing over the last few years and what is to come for them.

Marie Freire, PhD President The Foundation for the National Institutes of Health Bethesda, Md.

A three-judge federal court in Boston rejected the state of Maine's request for an expedited review of its Medicaid waiver application, Thursday, saying "the facts do no warrant" the need for a fast review.

About 47 percent of California voters older than 40 surveyed in a poll say a close family member will need long-term care within the next five years, and about as many say they couldn't afford even one month of nursing home costs, the SCAN Foundation and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research have found.

As director of the HIT Initiatives Group in the Office of E-health Standards and Services at CMS, Elizabeth Holland is intricately involved in shaping the meaningful use rules that some view as having the potential to transform healthcare. Holland is a veteran policymaker. She joined CMS in 1991. It was when the proposed rule for the Medicare fee schedule was in the works. CMS received 100,000 comments – all on paper.

There are no set appropriations for how much the federal government can spend on rewarding providers who adopt and use electronic health records under the Medicare and Medicaid meaningful use EHR incentive program, according to National Coordinator for Health IT Farzad Mostashari, MD.

States that want to create their own health insurance exchanges, rather than accept a federal model, have until September 30 to inform the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services of the minimum requirements for all plans sold in the exchange.