As the healthcare reform discussions in Washington finally start to grapple with cost control, some providers are becoming alarmed. Specialist physicians are up in arms over a proposal by Sens. Baucus and Grassley to have Medicare pay primary-care physicians 5 percent more while reducing specialists’ incomes by a like amount. CMS has made similar redistributions in the past that have had...
Health Care Industry Archive
April 2009
Sebelius confirmed – The U.S. Senate confirmed Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas as Secretary of Health and Human Services on Tuesday, and President Obama quickly swore her in as the final member of his cabinet. While her first order of business will be the swine flu emergency, she is expected to help lead the charge on health care reform. With Nancy-Ann DeParle helming the White House office...
Under the provisions of the economic stimulus law, physicians and hospitals must make “meaningful use” of a qualified electronic health record in order to qualify for government financial incentives that will be available in 2011. To help define “meaningful use,” the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics, an HHS advisory body, this week held a two-day hearing that included...
Healthcare providers and insurance companies have long been at odds over reimbursement, coverage, and pre-authorization issues. Now, it appears, physicians and hospitals may soon have another bone to pick with health plans, over medical tourism. Wellpoint, the largest U.S. health insurer, is conducting a pilot of medical tourism with Serigraph, a specialty graphics company with operations in...
Humana charges seniors more for its Medicare Advantage plans—and yet still they come! This was the prime revelation of the insurance company’s first-quarter earnings report: Despite raising its premiums by 4 to 11 percent and instituting premiums in areas of the country where Humana formerly had none, its Medicare Advantage enrollment increased to nearly 1.47 million members as of March 31,...
Neither side in the debate over comparativeness effectiveness research is being entirely honest. The pharmaceutical companies and device makers say they fear that patients won’t receive the care they need if payers use this research to justify not covering a drug, device, test, or procedure. But of course, they—and the doctors and hospitals who use or prescribe their products—stand to...
Good start for safety measure – In January, the Institute of Healthcare Improvement announced that it was trying to get all U.S. hospitals to test a surgical checklist by April 1. The checklist for ORs and surgeons has been shown to reduce complications and mortality. Although only 622 hospitals—about 10 percent of the total–had tried the checklist in at least one OR by IHI’s...
Great lakes of metaphorical ink have been used to describe the high hopes that primary-care medical societies, corporations, health plans, and politicians have for the “patient-centered medical home.” A number of plans have mounted pilots to test the PCMH concept, and Medicare is expected to follow suit soon. But Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan has gone one step further: It will soon...
In a post earlier this month, I took Google and Microsoft to task for acting as if new legal provisions meant to safeguard the privacy of patient-specific health data didn’t apply to their personal health records platforms, respectively known as Google Health and HealthVault. Since then, Google Health has taken a much larger public-relations hit. Last week, the Boston Globe noted that...
Electronic drug prescribing is growing rapidly, at long last—but it still represents only a small percentage of prescribers and the number of prescriptions being written. According to the latest figures released by Surescripts, the company that provides the connectivity between physician practices and pharmacies, the number of actively e-prescribing physicians and midlevel practitioners grew...
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