A decade ago, a not-for-profit organization called WorldVistA was launched with two missions.
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Getting excited about the American Medical Association's 1% increase in membership is almost like getting riled up about the Chicago White Sox getting back to .500 after a three-game sweep of the Cubs.
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For those with insurance through an employer, the price of healthcare increased in 2010 even as the use of healthcare did not, a new report shows. The Health Care Cost Institute, a not-for-profit that was launched last year, released its first report this week. It looks at healthcare prices, use, intensity of services and total spending for one out of five people with employer-sponsored insurance younger than age 65.
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Tom Munnecke, like other veteran programmers who have worked with the VistA electronic health-record system developed by the Veterans Affairs Department, has seen this movie before.
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It is time, once again, for my dispatch from the hallways of the Non-Profit Health Care Investor Conference in New York. I am not allowed past the hallway into presentations by top executives from large and financially strong health systems, who take questions from analysts and investors. The conference is sponsored by Citigroup, the Healthcare Financial Management Association and the American Hospital Association.
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Michigan and Nevada on Friday became the latest states to receive Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan, or CO-OP, loans from the CMS, bringing the award total to more than $982 million for these not-for-profit insurers created by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
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Here's my take on the Defense Department's latest update on the proposed joint Pentagon/Veterans Affairs Department Electronic Health Record development project.
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What's more endearing than mom and motherhood? How about a federal law that creates and distributes Happy Mother's Day wishes.
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I've written before about the federally supported health information technology regional extension center program established by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to help providers adopt and meaningfully use electronic health records systems.
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Before Jerry Seinfeld started writing jokes and appearing on television, there were doctors and scientists named Seinfeld writing medical research papers and getting their work published in medical journals.
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High deductibles have grown more commonplace in recent years, adopted by employers seeking to shift healthcare costs to households and promoted by policymakers as a way to make patients more cost-conscious. The shift, however, has also left households vulnerable to medical debt and hospitals with more write-offs from privately insured patients who do not pay.
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The most eye-catching reference in a recent Health Affairs report on patient fears when dealing with “authoritarian” doctors did not get a citation. That's because, instead of coming from a medical journal, it came from a classic episode of the “Seinfeld” TV show.
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A love of government work and family apparently drove HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius' controversial decision to accept an invitation to address a graduating class at one of the nation's highest-profile Roman Catholic universities.Sebelius accepted an invitation earlier this week to address graduates of the Georgetown Public Policy Institute on May 18.
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Many of the healthcare polls bouncing around Washington on any given week can potentially give federal policymakers the pulse of the nation on policy matters under consideration. But also buried in these polls are sometimes head-scratching questions and findings.The latest example came from a telephone health survey of 1,000 Americans released this week by Reader's Digest and the insurer Humana.
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Underwriters, which bring municipal bonds to the market, will be required to divulge their possible conflicts of interest and disclose the potential risks of complex debt deals that were volatile and costly for borrowers during the credit crisis under a new interpretation of muni market rules. The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board rule interpretation becomes effective in August. There are some limits on the new disclosures that matter to many healthcare borrowers.
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