Here's an interesting new business line from one widely known health system: Geisinger Health System will seek to market downloadable quality and efficiency applications as part of the organization's new research, development and evaluation center.
The new Geisinger Center for Health Care Transformation will organize and prioritize research under way at the Danville, Pa.-based system in conjunction with app development, said Dr. Earl Steinberg, who joined Geisinger nearly a year ago as executive vice president of innovation and dissemination. “We're going to concentrate in areas where we have strengths,” he said.
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The collective deficit for state budgets for the coming year is the smallest yet since the recession ended, a new survey shows.
But at $54 billion, the gap underscores how states continue to struggle from the economic downturn, write Elizabeth McNichol, Phil Oliff and Nicholas Johnson at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which conducted the survey.
State deficits “remain large by historical standards, as the economy remains weak and unemployment is still high,” they say.
As if to prove the point, the survey comes as Illinois lawmakers voted to slash Medicaid spending to address the state's budget woes, the Associated Press reports.
States may not fully recover for another seven years, should state tax revenue grow at last year's 8.3% rate, said the researchers. That's because of the “deep hole” states are in since the recession. Here's what the 2007-2009 recession looks like compared with the prior one:
Source: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
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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.
Price—not the frequency or intensity of medical care—proved to be behind the 3.3% growth in healthcare spending for the population, said authors of the new report.
Here's a look at price changes for major categories of healthcare services:
Source: Health Care Cost Institute
Several further studies using the data are expected, including research expected later this year on aging and healthcare costs.
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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.
Here's some of what I learned this year by cornering executives in the hallway:
Among systems, there is a concentration on growth, and not just for hospitals.
Ascension Health, the largest U.S. not-for-profit health system, will seek to diversify geographically and across healthcare services, said Robert Henkel, president and CEO of the system. “We don't see the end of growth anytime soon,” he said.
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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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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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The U.S., we know, spends far more than other countries on hospitals, doctors and other medical care. Now, researchers behind the latest international comparison of health spending have looked at supply of services, use, prices and quality for clues to why spending here is so much greater than a dozen other nations.
Here's a look at how much greater. It's the report's comparison of health spending as a percentage of gross domestic product:
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