Healthcare Finance Staff
Physician groups are pleased with their initial take of the final accountable care organization (ACO) rule issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on Oct. 20.
The Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) is calling on the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to issue a HIPAA 5010 contingency plan permitting health plans to adjudicate claims that may not have all the required data.
Healthcare Information Xchange of New York (HIXNY) announced Friday that it has connected its HIE with the cloud-based electronic health record from athenahealth.
One of the underreported results of the public comments period for accountable organizations this past summer was the emergence of a gap between patient-centric industry groups and those associations representing care providers of various sizes.
WellPoint and UnitedHealthcare are among private payers that have been testing new models to improve patient outcomes and lower costs, even before the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released rules around new payment and care delivery approaches.
CMS issued the final rules for accountable care organizations (ACO) on Thursday and, in so doing, sparked excitement throughout healthcare with what initially appears to be a more achievable set of qualifying parameters. But it will take some time for the healthcare industry to absorb and understand the changes.
As Joseph Kvedar, MD, director of Partners Healthcare's Center for Connected Health, looked out upon a crowded ballroom at Boston's Park Plaza Hotel Thursday afternoon, he was reminded of a concept hatched roughly two decades ago.
The American College of Physicians, which represents 132,000 internal medicine specialists, is proposing a privacy rule that says researchers should maximize appropriate uses of information to achieve scientific advances without compromising ethical obligations to protect individual welfare and privacy.
The U.S. healthcare system scored 64 of a possible 100 on key measures of performance, according to the third national scorecard report from the Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System. The report released Oct. 18 also reveals a poor score - 53 of a possible 100 - on measures of efficiency, showing relatively low use of electronic information systems and high administrative costs.
Eastern Connecticut Health Network, Inc. (ECHN) is building an HIE, and the health system has tapped MobileMD to help get the job done, signing a five-year agreement.