Biden: Healthcare IT to be included in stimulus bill — Vice President-elect Joe Biden said the economic-stimulus bill planned by the incoming Obama administration will include spending on healthcare IT, particularly efforts to encourage the use of electronic medical records. Details haven’t been finalized, but early talk puts the healthcare-IT portion of the bill at $25 billion....
Health Care Industry Archive
December 2008
Nonprofit Blue Cross and Blue Shield health-insurance plans in the U.S. are in tough straits. They’re increasingly in competition with nationwide giants like WellPoint and UnitedHealth Group, whose scale gives them leverage to hold the line on discounts with larger hospital chains and the resources to invest in major IT projects — however questionable their merits. And their...
As 2008 drew to a close, health-insurance providers and hospital systems once more drew swords over which could force the other to eat the lion’s share of rising medical costs. Most such clashes take place in comfortable obscurity, but a few manage to break into the news — often when negotiation turned into a game of chicken that could affect the healthcare of tens or hundreds of...
WellCare Health Plans is in a real bind. Not only did federal and state agents raid its headquarters just over a year ago, the administrator of Medicare and Medicaid programs across the country has since fired its CEO and two other top execs, laid off a bunch of employees, and announced it will restate three-and-a-half years of earnings thanks to more than $40 million in what it calls...
In comments to an earlier BNET item about Aetna’s “personal health record,” Merrill Goozner of GoozNews asked an excellent question: “[W]hy is there so much physician opposition to EMRs?” EMR, of course, is shorthand for “electronic medical records,” a main focus of the incoming Obama administration’s supposed $50 billion healthcare IT...
HSS-Emageon deal may be in jeopardy — A $62 million bid by Health Systems Solutions for Emageon, a maker of medical image-analysis technology, is at risk of falling apart. In a two-step worthy of the Keystone Kops, Emageon demanded that HSS finalize the deal by Dec. 23. HSS said it asked a bank to transfer the $62 million to complete the deal, but the bank refused. Now the deadline has...
The ECRI Institute, a nonprofit foundation devoted to evidence-based medicine, has just released its second annual listing of the ten biggest dangers posed by various healthcare technologies — and, perhaps more important, how to avoid them. This is a huge service, given that medical errors remain one of the largest preventable causes of death in the U.S. For some reason, however, ECRI...
WellCare Health Plans doesn’t have a lot to celebrate this year, but that doesn’t mean it can’t still try to see the bright side. Just two weeks ago, the mid-sized health-insurance company put out a glowing press release patting itself on the back for “providing an outstanding customer service experience.” WellCare crowed that it met “rigorous...
A few weeks ago, I noted that Aetna is showing interesting — if still nascent — signs of transforming its business, in part due to its seemingly aggressive embrace of healthcare information technology. My BNET colleague Ken Terry echoed this theme when he recently pointed out Aetna’s sizable lead over its larger rival, UnitedHealth Group, in terms of offering personal-health...
The American College of Physicians, which represents about 126,000 internists, has called on the incoming Obama Administration to ask Congress for a 10 percent increase in Medicare payments to primary-care physicians for a period of 18 months. In a letter to Tom Daschle, President-Elect Obama’s choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services, ACP President Jeffrey P. Harris, MD, said that...
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BNET Healthcare provides daily industry trends and news coverage with insights for managers and executives, focusing on major health care providers, hospitals and facilities, insurance companies, and medical device manufacturers. In addition to detailed company profiles, you will find detailed industry analysis on new alliances and partnerships, healthcare products, medical patents, health care cost control, lawsuits, management and board changes, and all other important business issues.