In America, nothing succeeds like celebrity. So once again, the celebrated Mayo Clinic is extending its brand across the country. This time, it is offering a free personal health record on the Microsoft HealthVault platform. The Mayo Clinic Health Manager, as the PHR is known, will provide not only a secure place to store medical records online, but also guidance from Mayo experts that will be...
Health Care Industry Archive
April 2009
The debate over the inclusion of a public health plan in the forthcoming healthcare reform legislation is heating up. Not surprisingly, much of the debate revolves around the comparison between the track records of Medicare and private insurance. Jacob Hacker, an author and a fellow at the New America Foundation, recently wrote a policy brief extolling the merits of the public plan. He argued...
CMS, which has recently targeted “never” events and avoidable complications in hospitals, is now tackling an even bigger challenge: readmissions. According to a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine, one in five Medicare patients is readmitted within a month of discharge; a third are back in the hospital three months after they’re discharged. The cost to Medicare was $17.9...
HCA profits rise – The profits of HCA, the nation’s largest for-profit hospital chain, are expected to rise markedly for the first quarter of 2009. HCA said that it anticipates first-quarter pre-tax income of $600 to $650 million, compared with $344 million for the prior-year period. Revenue is predicted to reach $7.4 billion, up from $7.27 billion for the year-earlier quarter. The increase...
Minnesota physicians are about to find out that those who fail to use new technology may become its victims. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota has launched a pilot program that allows patients to consult online with physicians, using instant messaging and webcams. Initially, the service is being made available only to BCBSMN’s 10,000 employees. But if the health plan likes the results,...
WellPoint’s sale of its pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) unit to St. Louis-based Express Scripts for $4.7 billion appears to be the result of a financial-driven decision. While the giant Blues holding company expects earnings growth in 2009, it also anticipates that its membership will drop by a million members because of increasing unemployment and the associated loss of employer-provided...
The Obama Administration’s 4.5 percent pay cut to Medicare Advantage plans for 2010, while a bit less than expected, is helping to fuel rumors that some major health insurers will merge. Aetna is said to be interested in taking over Humana, and United is reportedly eyeing Coventry. Such mergers would greatly concern health care providers, especially physicians. Many hospitals have formed...
A growing number of health plans are deciding that it doesn’t make sense for them to offer physicians individual web portals to check patient eligibility, benefits, claims status, and other insurance-related data. Instead, they’re using multi-payer portals that simplify the workflow in the physician office by reducing the number of sites that staffers have to check for this information. The...
Although Google and Microsoft have gotten plenty of attention for their Web-based personal health records, both companies have long maintained that they’re not bound by the privacy protections of a 1996 federal law known as HIPAA. And despite a recent HIPAA change — one intended to extend its privacy provisions to services like Google Health and Microsoft’s HealthVault —...
Here’s a shocking statistic: Only 6 percent of hospitals have enough portions of an electronic health record to qualify for government incentives under the economic stimulus legislation. That’s according to Dave Garets, president and CEO of HIMSS Analytics, the research arm of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, which began its annual conference today in...
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