Healthcare Finance Staff
As more insurance companies adopt mobile strategies, Google's payer guru says health insurance as a whole has a lot of work to do following the modern mobile, internet-based consumer.
Hospitals are increasingly adding retail clinics to their array of services because they can help to reduce some costs. A recent national study by the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC) found that the proportion of retail clinics owned by hospital systems doubled (from 9 percent to 18 percent) between 2007 and 2010.
Physicians across a number of specialties are taking the lead to test developing new payment and delivery models. But they need more support from commercial and public payers to make them more widely adopted.
UnitedHealthcare is making available an online and mobile cost and quality estimator tool for inpatient medical services, including for knee replacement, spinal surgery and childbirth.
Some 5,800 physicians at Anthem Blue Cross of California are being notified that their Social Security or tax identification numbers were posted online by mistake.
The trend toward value-based payment for healthcare services is gaining momentum. For better or for worse, we have paid for healthcare in the U.S. on a fee-for-service basis – from the perspective of providers (doctors, hospitals, etc.), that means that the more you do, the more you make. Except for efforts around managed care, where a fixed capitated (per-member-per-month) fee is paid to risk-taking organizations for a defined population of patients (the HMO model), fee-for-service has been at the core of how we do business in healthcare.
Medicare could benefit with improved care and savings if seniors could access healthcare services online, according to a study that found that increasingly more tech savvy older consumers are interested in using digital health tools in their home.
President Barack Obama's bid to throw a life preserver to stranded consumers who received cancellation notices from their health plans may lead to financial losses and uncertainty for payers and increase bad debt for hospitals.
The new face of Medicaid may be underemployed millennials, but that may bode well for Medicaid's finances.
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.