News
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.
Faced with an endless cycle of non-urgent visits to the doctor or, worse, the emergency room, employers and health plans are looking to telemedicine for an easier way to connect the stuffy nose – or the sprained ankle, or the upset stomach – to the doctor. Those connections are now being made online or though phone calls engineered by companies like Teladoc, Stat Health Services and American Well.
Partners HealthCare, a nine-hospital health system with 1,800 primary care physicians and more than 6,000 specialists, has agreed to join Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts' Alternative Quality Contract (AQC) global payment model beginning Jan. 1, 2012.
Federal bundled payments efforts promise providers a share in savings for improved quality and lower costs, but it will likely take the squeeze in fee-for-service Medicare payments to drive many providers to participate.
Georgia state officials are planning to implement a little-known provision of the Affordable Care Act allowing states to move the children of state employees onto the Children's Health Insurance Program, something only a handful of states have done so far.
A much-anticipated report from the Institute of Medicine providing guidance to the Department of Health and Human Services on how to define essential health benefits came down squarely on the side of controlling the costs of providing those benefits with an emphasis on benefits that are effective and provide high value.
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.
Healthcare costs are in a constant state of expansion yet physicians do not understand how much the care they recommend costs and they are not getting the training they should have so that they will understand those costs and what they can do to responsibly contain them, said Steve Weinberger, MD, executive vice president and CEO of the American College of Physicians, in an opinion piece published in September in the ACP’s Annals of Internal Medicine.
The ad starts off pretty tamely, with an older woman sitting on the edge of examination table in a doctor’s office. Her doctor asks her if she has any questions. She says no.
Louisiana Health Care Quality Forum (LHCQF) and Orion Health, Inc. announced Friday the launch of LaHIE, Louisiana's statewide health information exchange.