Healthcare Finance Staff
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.
In early October the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an advisory panel that helps inform the government on preventive healthcare, downgrade its recommendation on the PSA test for prostate cancer screening to a grade of D. It recommended doctors not routinely prescribe the test because "there is moderate or high certainty that the service has no net benefit or that the harms outweigh the benefits."
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.
Healthcare IT stakeholders gathered Oct. 14 in Washington for a work meeting, discussing ways IT could help improve transitions in care.
U.S. National Healthcare Expenditures (NHE) are $2.7 trillion in 20111 and are forecasted to grow 34% in five years. This multi-trillion dollar economy will shift its reimbursement paradigm to ICD-102 in under 24 months. ICD-10 will introduce opportunities and risks to hospitals and health plans that may be equivalent to the $148.2 billion to $500 billion in losses3 to the U.S. economy in the mortgage crisis. This is because ICD-10 introduces favorable and unfavorable reimbursement results.