Healthcare Finance Staff

Last week was a real roller coaster ride for Tenet Healthcare. On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced it was fining the hospital network $42.75 million to settle allegations it violated the False Claims Act; then on Thursday Tenet announced an agreement with HHS that would add $84 million to its coffers to correct Medicare underpayments.

Brian Burns, SVP of Health Care Services and Chief Contracting Officer, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City discusses why the regional payer extended its existing PCMH model into broader health systems as opposed to encouraging an ACO model.

Thanks to former governor Mitt Romney, healthcare reform is working in Massachusetts. In fact, the state is number one in the nation for coverage because of the pivotal individual mandate he promoted.

The National Council on Aging and Humana Inc.'s Humana Cares have announced they will partner to pilot Stanford University's online Chronic Disease Self-Management Program (CDSMP).

With the health reform law expected to impact state Medicaid in 2014, a lot of states are scrambling to get their ducks in order to handle the onslaught of new beneficiaries and claims.

The California Telehealth Network will expand telemedicine training and provide technical support for rural and medically underserved clinics and hospitals in California with a $700,000 from UnitedHealthcare, building on the $600,000 it donated in 2010.

A new study from HIMSS Analytics and Kroll Advisory Solutions shows that, a diligent focus on security compliance notwithstanding, healthcare providers are still badly lacking when it comes to privacy protections. In fact, data breaches have only increased in recent years.

A new brief by the Commonwealth Fund using insurance company MLR data from 2010 shows that health insurance consumers would have received $2 billion in rebates if the new medical loss ratio (MLR) rules contained in the Affordable Care Act had been in effect that year.

The Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI), which bills itself as the leading authority on the use of health IT to improve the exchange of healthcare information, today announced its collaboration with other industry and government entities to support the industry's upgrade to ASC X12 5010.

The American Health Information Management Association has issued a strong recommendation for healthcare providers to adopt ICD-10 as quickly as possible. This comes as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) contemplates delaying the deadline for one year, until Oct. 1, 2014.