Primary care news and information

Republican and Democratic leaders on the House Energy and Commerce Committee released the latest version of a draft bill to repeal Medicare's sustainable growth-rate formula calling for a five-year period of stable payment increases as physicians transition into new payment models. But lawmakers...
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Health professionals are increasingly trying to persuade patients to create and share family medical histories, because they can provide doctors with valuable information that can help them create individualized preventive-care plans.
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Atrius Health is one of nearly two dozen ACOs that agreed to stick with Medicare's test of the promising but unproven model. Atrius also saw a financial loss during the experiment's first year.
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About half of the state's primary-care practices are closed to new patients and wait times to see a primary-care physician remain long, according to the results of an annual survey released Monday by the Massachusetts Medical Society.
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Neonatologists registered the biggest increase in pay among the 23 specialties tracked in the 20th annual Modern Healthcare Physician Compensation Survey.
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Urgent-care centers are more frequently becoming alternative sites for convenient and timely healthcare access, without the downside of interrupted care coordination, according to a qualitative study conducted by the Center for Studying Health System Change.
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Hospitals girding for an influx of Medicaid patients in 2014 under the healthcare reform law's Medicaid coverage expansion recently were given some new regulatory tools to deal with the financial fallout.
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Healthcare providers have long decried the cacophony of reporting requirements under various CMS programs and have asked for harmonization of the rules. Now, the 652-page proposed rule encompassing changes to the Medicare Physician Payment Schedule, released Monday, may have providers who report...
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In an important first, the CMS is considering paying primary-care physicians for complex chronic care management services of Medicare patients without an in-person patient visit.
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Hospitals would get a 1.8% boost in their outpatient Medicare payments next year while the increase for ambulatory surgery centers would total 0.9%, under a proposed rule from the CMS.
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