A growing number of hospitals across the country are making promises to stop billing patients and payers for care related to certain medical errors, but the efforts appear to be more of a public relations move than a substantive change.
Cardinal Health, Dublin, Ohio, said the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration suspended its license to distribute controlled substances from its Lakeland, Fla., distribution center effective Dec. 10, marking the second DEA action against the drug...
The landmark settlement of more than $600 million reached late last week between William McGuire and UnitedHealth Group—as well as a separate settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission—isn’t the end of the story.
A growing number of hospitals across the country are making promises to stop billing patients and payers for care related to certain medical errors, but the efforts appear to be more of a public relations move than a substantive change.
If there were ever any illusions that pay-for-reporting was going to be the easy part of Medicare’s monumental shift toward paying for results rather than volume, just check in with several prominent hospitals and health systems around the country...
Prospects for a broad Medicare legislative package were thrown into jeopardy last week after a stalemate over how—and for how long—such a bill should be funded. As a result, physicians may have to start the new year being paid 10% less for each...
St. Charles Parish Hospital in Luling, La., became the latest hospital district to feel the sting of Standard & Poor’s decision earlier this year to revise its criteria for tax-secured, general-obligation hospital debt.
In what may be a sign of continuing investigations, Minneapolis-based Medtronic said last week that it has since September received four letters from federal officials and lawmakers investigating whether consulting payments and other items of value...
A survey released last week indicated that less than half of physicians report incompetent behavior or medical errors among their peers, with industry experts pointing to a host of reasons as to why that may be the case.
In healthcare, where buzzwords tend to have the lifespan of fruit flies, “Health 2.0” is maybe a year old and already is growing cyber-whiskers, on a given day generating more than 130,000 hits on Google, outstripping “consumer-directed healthcare”...
With a report out from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealing that one in five Americans can’t get the healthcare they need, a major physicians group seriously entertaining the idea of a single-payer system and presidential...
My organization, New York City Health and Hospitals Corp.—the largest public hospital system in the U.S.—last month voluntarily released safety and quality data, including our individual facility mortality and hospital-acquired infection...
Regarding a single-payer system, which is mentioned frequently in your “Guide to Healthcare in the 2008 Presidential Campaign” (Nov. 26 issue): As a physician who worked in both Canada and the U.S., I can state that neither country’s system is...
Where did Thanksgiving go? Sometimes it’s hard to grasp how quickly time passes us by. A good friend of mine told me years ago that the one thing he could never get over is how time seems to accelerate with each passing year. When you’re young, days...
The Ann Arbor (Mich.) Area Health Information Exchange is accomplishing what many voluntary consortiums of independent medical groups have only dreamed of doing: earning pay-for-performance dollars and improving patient outcomes by sharing clinical...
The man who invaded Hillary Rodham Clinton’s New Hampshire campaign headquarters—taking several hostages before giving himself up—wound up causing Frisbie Memorial Hospital in Rochester, N.H., to issue a cryptic statement from its chief...
