The Service Employees International Union today unveiled a Spanish-language video featuring two Latino doctors aimed at encouraging Latinos to enroll in a health plan through the new state insurance exchanges.
Two Latino physicians, Dr. Say Salomón and Dr. Michelle Espinoza, recorded videos in English and Spanish and talked about the benefits of signing up once state insurance exchanges become active Tuesday.
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Alexander
Seventeen Senate Republicans are asking HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to again delay the looming implementation of more stringent criteria for the federal electronic health record incentive payment program. Their request follows a plea to providers from a leading EHR vendor to ask the government for more time.
Their call came in a letter Tuesday to Sebelius requesting an extension of the Stage 2 meaningful-use requirements by one year “for providers who need extra time to meet the new requirements. Providers who are ready to attest to Stage 2 in 2014 should be able to do so with current policy,” the senators said.
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The American College of Physicians released a Web-based clinical decision support tool for internal medicine physicians known as ACP Smart Medicine.
Accessible from desktops, smartphones and tablets, the online tool includes 500 modules with evidence-based content and recommendations for a variety of conditions and diseases.
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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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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 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has joined the entities urging the CMS to publish the Medicare earnings and de-identified clinical data of individual physicians. But the foundation stopped short of calling for widespread public release to any interested party.
In recent years, the CMS has published several datasets for the first time, including average hospital charges for common Medicare treatments and the prescribing patterns of doctors in Medicare's drug-benefit program. Now a ruling this year in a 30-year-old lawsuit is prompting the agency to consider releasing a long-sought dataset that would show how individual doctors care for and are paid to treat patients on Medicare.
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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 study found no evidence that primary-care physicians spend less time with safety net patients and the uninsured than with privately insured patients, countering longstanding assumptions that doctors give less attention to Medicaid and uninsured patients.
The study in the September issue of the journal Health Affairs looked at the amount of time physicians spent with patients and found no significant differences between those with private insurance and patients with Medicaid or those uninsured.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports use of a number of family-planning services by women in their prime child-bearing years dropped across the board in the late 2000s even as the median age for beginning sexual activity dropped to just past 17.
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