Hoven
The American Medical Association held a dedication ceremony Thursday morning to celebrate the opening of its new location in an iconic downtown Chicago skyscraper. Built in 1972 and formerly known as the IBM Building, the AMA's new headquarters is the last American office building designed by famed architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and it now goes by the name “AMA Plaza.”
The oldest and largest physician organization and its approximately 1,000 employees will be housed in the floors 39-47 of the 52-story building located between the Trump Tower and the House of Blues. Although rumors of a move to Washington surface from time to time, the 166-year-old AMA has been based in downtown Chicago since 1902 and this is the fourth location it has called home. All four locations are within a few blocks of each other, and the AMA had been at its previous site—designed by architect Kenzo Tange—since 1990.
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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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Here's a sobering thought: Nearly 40% of all children in the U.S. are eligible for the Children's Health Insurance Program, which provides automatic healthcare coverage for the poor. That means 4 in 10 kids in the U.S. are growing up in poverty or near-poverty.
Here's another sobering thought. Not every kid who is eligible gets coverage through the entitlement program. Their parents must apply for CHIP/Medicaid and many don't.
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A trade group representing the orthotics and prosthetics industry is accusing the CMS of failing to enforce anti-fraud and abuse laws against unlicensed providers at a time when legitimate providers are coming under fire from increasingly aggressive Medicare recovery auditors.
The American Orthotic and Prosthetic Association—which represents more than 2,000 businesses that manufacture, distribute and supply patients with orthopedic braces and artificial limbs—released the results of a study this week that says the number of Medicare patients receiving the medical equipment from noncertified personnel has not changed significantly even though the rules were tightened in 2000 and 2005.
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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 American College of Physicians is nervous about where HHS is headed with the criteria for meaningful use of electronic health records.
The organization wrote a letter to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology addressing “what has been released for Stage 2 and what we have been told to expect for Stage 3” in the federal EHR meaningful-use program.
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Hoven
“To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of the death of private practice medicine have been greatly exaggerated,” Dr. Ardis Dee Hoven, president of the American Medical Association, said in a news release touting the findings of a recent survey that indicates how the trend toward hospital employment of physicians may be overstated.
According to the AMA's new Physician Practice Benchmark Survey, 53.2% of physicians were self-employed in 2012, 41.8% were employed and 5% were independent contractors.
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Faulkner
The star of the Epic Systems Corp. user's group meeting that got underway in Verona, Wis., Tuesday was the venue itself, the cavernous five-story, 11,400-seat Deep Space auditorium that is literally buried into a hillside and designed so the view across the rolling Wisconsin campus would be undisturbed.
If Epic gets any bigger, the structure was designed so a balcony could be added to push its seating capacity to 15,500, according to CEO Judith Faulkner.
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Declaring that the “move toward team-based care requires fresh thinking,” the American College of Physicians released a new policy paper that outlines professionalism, licensure, reimbursement and research principles for such teams to follow. The document appears unlikely to settle deep divisions between physicians and their team members on those matters.
Teams of physicians, nurses, physician assistants, clinical pharmacists, social workers and other health professionals require “a new way of thinking about clinical responsibilities and leadership, one that recognizes that different clinicians will assume principal responsibility for specific elements of a patient's care as the patient's needs dictate,” according to the authors, Robert Doherty, ACP senior vice president for government and public policy, and Ryan Crowley, ACP senior health policy analyst. The paper, “Principles Supporting Dynamic Clinical Care Teams,” was published Monday in theAnnals of Internal Medicine.
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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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The Chicago-based health information technology business accelerator, Healthbox, is seeking applicants for its second group of local companies looking for mentoring, funding, and, most importantly, some help getting their feet in the door with healthcare providers and payers.
The application process is open through Sept. 29.
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