Rene Letourneau

Absences account for 35 percent of every organization's annual payroll budget, said Colleen Daigle to an audience at the KronosWorks2011 conference in Orlando on Monday.

So far this year, more than 2.2 million people with Medicare have saved more than $1.2 billion on their prescriptions, for an average of $550 per person, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced Friday.

Healthcare Finance News Managing Editor René Letourneau spoke recently with Rosemary Sheehan, vice president of revenue cycle operations at Boston-area Partners HealthCare system about her organization’s ICD-10 preparedness efforts:

According to financial services firm Jones Lang LaSalle, healthcare real estate investment trusts (HCREITs) have raised $22.5 billion over the past 18 months, spiking third party interest in the medical property sector.

Physicians estimate the cost of defensive medicine to be between 26 and 34 percent of total annual healthcare costs, according to a recent report by Jackson Healthcare. At an estimated $2.5 trillion in annual spending, this means $650-850 billion is spent each year on medical orders intended to avoid lawsuits rather than treat patients.

Wisconsin hospitals generate $28 billion in annual economic activity for the state, according to a study released Thursday by the University of Wisconsin-Cooperative Extension Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics and the Wisconsin Hospital Association (WHA).

Information technology and business process services firm CGI Group, Inc. announced this week that it will now report a separate health global vertical segment.

Use of generic prescription drugs in the United States has saved consumers and the healthcare system $931 billion over the last 10 years, according to a new report from the Generic Pharmaceutical Association (GPhA).

With the October 2013 deadline for ICD-10 implementation looming, providers are looking for solutions to make the shift as painless as possible. St. Paul, Minn.-based 3M Health Information Systems recently released its 360 Encompass System, which offers auto-suggested codes and real-time clinical documentation improvement prompts that are delivered at the point of care. The application codes in ICD-10 and also enables coding in ICD-9 while viewing the ICD-10 equivalent.

Web-based healthcare information provider HealthGrades announced Wednesday that it has reached a definitive agreement to merge with CPM, a customer relationship management solutions firm.