Mainly because of the HITECH Act, part of the economic stimulus legislation passed earlier this year, the U.S. is now finally heading down the road toward widespread health IT adoption and a national health information network. But the discussion about this strategy often gets bogged down in such details as what constitutes “meaningful use” of EHRs. A longer-term view is provided by a new...
Health Care Industry Archive
July 2009
Talk to Colin Evans, the CEO of Dossia, a personal health records company founded by Wal Mart and several other large corporations, and you get the impression that employers have a different view of this technology than insurance companies and healthcare providers do. The big employers involved in Dossia—which also include AT&T, Applied Materials, BP America, Cardinal Health, Intel,...
Estimated cost savings to hospitals from the use of electronic health records are quite large: For example, a RAND study published in 2005 calculated that the inpatient savings from efficiency alone could total $57 billion annually within 15 years, assuming a 90 percent adoption rate. But those savings included only $2.4 billion of annual savings in medical record handling, which one might...
Last month, I wrote about the latest opinion on gainsharing—the sharing of operational savings by hospitals with physicians–from HHS’ Office of the Inspector General (OIG). Although OIG had declared gainsharing illegal in July 1999, it told the hospital that had requested the advisory opinion that it could proceed with its gainsharing plan without fear of prosecution. Well, it turns...
As talk of CMS moving toward payment bundling continues, some observers think it’s going to be very difficult for physicians and hospitals to become partners, because of physicians’ distrust of hospitals. But it’s going to be nearly as hard to get physicians to collaborate with each other to reduce hospitalizations and readmissions. A CMS demonstration project that shifts some...
Device Makers’ Turn? – There’s talk that the Obama Administration may ask the medical device industry to pledge between $15 billion and $25 billion in savings over the next 10 years to help pay for healthcare reform. The Administration has already gotten agreements from hospitals and pharmaceutical companies, fueling speculation that device makers may be next. Medicare doesn’t buy...
While the debate over the public plan option continues, little attention has been paid to the health insurance exchanges that are part of the leading proposals now before Congress. Judging by the conclusions of a recent report from the California Healthcare Foundation, that might be a serious error of omission. Modeled after the Federal Employee Health Benefit Program (FEHBP), the insurance...
The number of health information exchanges (HIEs) in the U.S. is soaring. While some recently formed exchange initiatives are looking to capture federal funds, the big increase in the number of operational HIEs appears to be unrelated to the $300 million that the economic stimulus legislation authorized for HIEs, since most of those exchanges have been in development for some time. The annual...
UnitedHealth Group, which already owns a formidable market share in the New York metropolitan area, is about to become even larger and more powerful in that region with the acquisition of Health Net’s 578,000 members in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. The Woodland Hills, CA-based insurer says it is shedding its Northeastern operations to concentrate on its core Western markets. It’s...
Wonder what sectors of the economy are still growing? An article in The Sunday New York Times provides the answer: Of the 10 areas that are growing at an annual rate of more than 3 percent, six are in health care. Hospitals, for example, are expanding at a nice 3.4 percent clip. One reason is that healthcare systems are continuing to add new facilities in areas where the population is...
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