Stephen Nuckolls, CEO of Coastal Carolina Health Care, New Bern, N.C., shared some lessons at the Medical Group Management Association annual conference yesterday from his organization's experience in running a Medicare accountable care organization.
He said that when his organization was forming its 50-provider accountable care organization, hiring a consultant was money well-spent, but outsourcing the staff of its after-hours call center was not. The consultant offered concrete steps to advance the ACO goal of keeping people out of the hospital and emergency department. But the employees of the contracted call center company worked against that goal.
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There has been a lot of complaining lately about the lack of interoperability in healthcare information technology and how the inability of computers to communicate with each other impedes organizing population health-improvement systems. But two Southern California organizations that just announced a deal to open a string of primary-care health centers said interoperability concerns will not stand in the way.
Southern California's MemorialCare Health System and UC Irvine Health announced the collaboration Oct. 2. Although the hospitals and medical groups of the two systems use a mix of products that includes Allscripts, NextGen Healthcare as well as both Epic's hospital and ambulatory systems, organization executives say interfaces can be created to let them all talk to each other.
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Keehan
Ascension Health, Bon Secours Health System, the American Hospital Association, the Catholic Health Association and the Federation of American Hospitals are among more than 900 organizations, providers and businesses helping Americans learn about the healthcare reform law and sign up for health insurance coverage, HHS announced one day before open enrollment begins on the law's health insurance exchanges.
Called “Champions for Coverage,” these volunteers—which include faith-based organizations, community health centers and bloggers—will use digital and print materials from the CMS to educate people about their options in the state health insurance exchanges that were created by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Open enrollment on the exchanges will last from October through March, and those who enroll by Dec. 15 will have coverage starting on Jan. 1, 2014.
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There are more than 200 mobile healthcare applications co-branded with healthcare organizations available on the two main online app marketplaces, Google Play and the Apple App Store, a new research report shows.
“The box we had around this was the hospital's name—it had to be clearly designated as an app from them,” said Brian Dolan, managing editor and co-founder of MobiHealthNews.com, a website that covers the burgeoning mobile health app space. “It was built for them or built by them and it had to be for patients. We wanted this to be about patient engagement.”
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The Federal Trade Commission has thrown a few wet blankets in the go-go world of healthcare corporate transactions in recent years, in the form of litigation to block mergers. But the agency's new director says most of the FTC's enforcement of antitrust laws actually happens in the less-discussed context of out-of-court settlements known as “consent orders.”
Deborah Feinstein, director of the FTC's Competition Bureau, told audiences at a legal conference in New York on Tuesday that litigation is too slow, costly, uncertain and imprecise to be used in every situation. Whenever the commission has a “workable settlement offer” that repairs the competitive harm, commissioners may decide a settlement is in the public's best interest.
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The Delaware Regional Extension Center is batting better than a thousand.
It is the first of the 62 health information technology extension centers funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to meet its target of helping 1,000 healthcare providers across the finishing line as “meaningful users” of electronic health-record systems under the federal EHR incentive payment program.
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A rule that would require medical devices to be marked with unique identifiers is still stuck in the regulatory process, and the delay is drawing complaints from lawmakers and health systems.
Four House lawmakers sent a letter to the Office of Management and Budget, which has yet to release the final rule for the unique device identification system, urging OMB to provide a status update. It has been six years since Congress mandated the development of a device identification system.
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Two new studies have put a price tag on healthcare services considered of little benefit to patients. In both reports, researchers raised questions about the role that healthcare providers play in delivering potentially unnecessary care.
One study examined the cost of care for patients who were taken by ambulance to the most sophisticated, well-equipped trauma centers despite injuries that required far less intensive care.
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A large hospital consortium and two health systems have launched a "big data" pilot project to automatically extract claims and clinical data from their information technology systems.
UHC, the Chicago-based University HealthSystem Consortium of 118 academic medical centers and nearly 300 affiliated hospitals, is collaborating with NYU Langone Medical Center in New York and the Cleveland Clinic on the project.
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The not-for-profit group responsible for educating Americans about the healthcare reform law's coverage options provided a status check of its efforts on Monday, but remained vague about how much it is spending on the massive endeavor.
Throughout 2014, Enroll America will spend “tens of millions” of dollars on the “Get Covered” campaign that it launched in late June, Anne Filipic, the group's president, told reporters in a phone call.
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The not-for-profit group responsible for educating Americans about the healthcare reform law's coverage options provided a status check of its efforts on Monday, but remained vague about how much it is spending on the massive endeavor.
Throughout 2014, Enroll America will spend “tens of millions” of dollars on the “Get Covered” campaign that it launched in late June, Anne Filipic, the group's president, told reporters in a phone call.
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