Healthcare Finance Staff
President Barack Obama signed the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 on Wednesday. The law is the companion to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that he signed into law on March 23.
Forty-eight upstate New York hospitals earned more than $22 million in quality improvement incentive payments from Excellus BlueCross BlueShield as part of the health insurer's Hospital Performance Incentive Program.
Launched in 2004, the program uses nationally recognized standards and guidelines to address specific areas for improvement, including clinical outcomes, patient safety, patient satisfaction and efficiency.
"Aetna is dedicated to helping people achieve health and financial security, and we believe fostering a healthy environment is an important part of this mission," reads the health insurer's environmental policy statement. "We are committed to limiting our environmental impact by reducing our energy consumption and the use of other resources… because we recognize the impact of a clean environment on the health of our members."
American Well, which offers Web-based physician visits for members of health plans in Hawaii and Minnesota, has landed another contract closer to home.
NaviNet, the country's largest real-time healthcare communications network, has announced a partnership with major health insurers in New Jersey to build a multi-payer portal as a "one-stop shop" for physicians to communicate directly with an array of health plans.
The Regenstrief Institute, recognized as a healthcare IT leader, has been awarded a contract to help the Social Security Administration and Indiana healthcare providers make disability case determinations faster and better.
The Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare (CAQH), a nonprofit alliance of health plans that seeks to simplify administration for payers and providers and enable better care for patients, has announced a partnership with VeriSign, Inc., the Mountain View, Calif. network infrastructure company.
The two of them will launch a pilot program that aims to demonstrate a secure data exchange that could be a model for national health IT interoperability.
For all the excited talk about the potential for IT to transform the healthcare industry for the better, many doctors are skeptical about the future, according to a recent survey conducted by athenahealth, the provider of online practice manag
Colorado is one of six states that will receive federal matching funds for state planning activities necessary to implement the electronic health record incentive program established by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
The remote health management market (RHM) is the smallest, but fastest growing segment of the home health management (HHM) market, according to global strategy consulting firm, Scientia Advisors.