Business Intelligence

The stakes are high for the companies and CalPERS, which is struggling along with many employers nationwide to contain fast-rising drug costs.

The nation in the next few years faces many important decisions about health care -- most of which have little to do with the controversial federal health law. Here are five issues candidates should be discussing, but largely are not.

The cost of long-term, in-home care is greatly underestimated, says a new study from insurance holding company Genworth Financial. In fact, most Americans underestimate the cost by close to 50 percent.

Instead of slashing jobs to cut costs and increase profits, hospitals should focus on delivering high-quality customer experiences to widen their margins. That's the word from a new study released by Accenture, which shows that hospitals who delivered superior customer experiences increased their net margins by 50 percent over average-performing facilities.

When Leapfrog released their Spring 2016 patient safety grades recently, 15 hospitals got slapped with a very public 'F' grade casting a spotlight on them that no institution wants. But with more patients weighing public hospital grades, experts, as well as a few hospitals which have faced down bad grades, say denial is the last thing a poorly marked hospital should do.

The company targets millennials, who have been at the forefront of change in other industries. Zoom is designed for an imaginary patient named Sarah, who is in her early thirties and wants to get her health care the same way she gets other services in her life -- quickly and efficiently.

With the healthcare industry suddenly accounting for nearly 25 percent of all data breaches, a new study from The Brookings Institution suggests some new cybersecurity strategies are needed.

The study measures how many people were hospitalized between 2002 and 2012 because they were abusing heroin or prescription painkillers, and how many of them got serious infections related to their drug use. It also tracks what hospitals charged to treat those patients and how the hospitals were paid.

The findings are based on Medicare cost reports from fiscal year 2013, analyzing almost 3,000 acute-care hospitals. About 60 percent were nonprofit, while one in four were for-profit. The rest were public, or government-owned.

The bonuses are small, generally a fraction of a percent of their Medicare payments. Nonetheless, rewarding hospitals of mediocre quality was hardly the stated goal when the Affordable Care Act created financial incentives to encourage better medical care from hospitals, doctors and other health care providers.