The news Thursday that the Internal Revenue Service will recognize same-sex marriages, no matter where the couples live, will have healthcare implications.
They're not necessarily positive ones, according to Brian Haile, senior vice president for healthcare policy at Jackson Hewitt Tax Service.
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Part of a four-year tentative labor agreement reached this week between the California Nurses Association and Dignity Health includes a new program designed to curtail and deal with workplace violence.
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The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has a nifty online tool to help leaders of hospitals and physician groups, and other eligible professionals keep track of the meaningful-use criteria they must meet to qualify for the upcoming Stage 2 of the electronic health-record incentive payment program.
For both hospitals and physicians and other eligible professionals, the site lists all the relevant core and menu objectives as well as the clinical quality measures that make up the Stage 2 criteria. It also enables a provider to select the objectives and clinical quality measures they intend to use and download copies of them and their descriptions in spreadsheet, PDF or XML formats.
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U.S. District Judge Mary Rowland asked the defendant how he was doing today.
“I've had better days, your honor,” replied Dike Ajiri, CEO of Mobile Doctors, a Chicago-based firm providing home health services in six states.
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HHS has more than a mobile strategy. It also has 33 mobile apps to back up its plan, and recently sent out an e-mail to tout them.
It's all part of a larger Digital Government Strategy launched by the Obama administration in May 2012 based on the premise that “all Americans should be able to access information from their government anywhere, anytime and on any device.”
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Larger independent physician groups with “strong primary-care orientations” and where doctors have accepted greater financial risk deliver better quality care for Medicare beneficiaries at lower cost, according to a report in JAMA Internal Medicine.
Researchers with Harvard Medical School's healthcare policy department studied 2009 Medicare claims for almost 4.3 million beneficiaries and compared spending and quality measures for small (one to 10 doctors), medium-to-large and hospital-based physician groups. Quality measures included 30-day hospital readmissions, and mammography, diabetes and cholesterol screening for the appropriate patients.
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Two years ago, Florida Hospital successfully sought a state license to operate its own health plan. That plan soon stalled, as officials realized the cost and time required to build an insurance arm would be too great.
A faster route, they decided, would be to buy one.
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Some people protest with a picket sign, others with a bullhorn. For health information technology consultant Gary Dickinson, his mode of protest is the matrix.
“It's kind of my outgrowth of frustration for many months,” said Dickinson, the co-chairman of an electronic health record working group of Health Level Seven, a standards development organization.
Right now, he said, what the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology is calling interoperability shouldn't be called that, at least not yet. “We need to acknowledge as we go forward that the real benchmark (on interoperability) is still ahead of us,” he said.
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A large North Carolina hospital and a suburban Chicago system are the latest to trim their payrolls and point to revenue pressure from the federal healthcare reform law as a primary cause.
At Mission Hospital in Asheville, N.C., the belt-tightening hits the C-suite, including the CEO's salary.
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The CMS on Tuesday heralded a lower prevalence of antipsychotic drug use in the nation's nursing homes, which the agency attributes to a dementia-care program it launched last year.
According to the agency, data released on the Nursing Home Compare website in July showed that nursing homes are using antipsychotic drugs less and pursuing more patient-centered treatment for dementia and other behavioral healthcare.
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The CMS on Tuesday heralded a lower prevalence of antipsychotic drug use in the nation's nursing homes, which the agency attributes to a dementia-care program it launched last year.
According to the agency, data released on the Nursing Home Compare website in July showed that nursing homes are using antipsychotic drugs less and pursuing more patient-centered treatment for dementia and other behavioral healthcare.
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