Current medical news and unique business news for anyone who cares about healthcare.
State legislatures will make healthcare a priority in 2012. Healthcare is among the top 12 issues for state legislators in 2012, says the National Council of State Legislatures. That includes Medicaid and Medicare reform, health insurance exchanges and health information exchanges. On the health information exchange side, there will be a big push for all healthcare providers to adopt EHRs by mid-2012, the council says. And insurance-wise, if states choose to administer their own health insurance exchanges, they must have infrastructure in place by next January.
Cancer deaths down slightly from ’04-’08. New stats from the American Cancer Society show a fall in the overall incidence and death rates for cancer as a whole. But several cancers are still on the rise: HPV-related oral cancers; melanoma; and thyroid, liver, kidney, pancreatic and esophageal cancers.
The Healthcare Payments Industry Has a Perception Problem
Healthcare payments are no longer about transactions. It’s about controlling the revenue cycle. And increasingly, that control is not sitting with ISOs.
Hospital marketing goes up again. Hospitals spent 20 percent more on advertising in the first half of 2011 than they did in the first half of 2010. The biggest spenders were the usual suspects — Mayo Clinic, New York Presbyterian and Mount Sanai, according to Kantar Media. The idea of marketing teaching hospitals is a relatively new phenomenon that’s over the last two decades, as reimbursements issues have forced them to extend beyond their normal geographic boundaries to sustain their research, education and patient care.
Actavis settles fraud case for $118 million. Iceland-based Actavis Group Hf (with a U.S. group based in New Jersey) agreed to hand over more than $118 million to settle a case in which it was accused of falsely reporting inflated drug prices and defrauding the U.S. and state governments.
HITECH Act too good to fail? The former head of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, David Blumenthal, writes in the New England Journal of Medicine that the HITECH Act, which encompasses meaningful use of electronic health records and implementation of health insurance exchanges — is inevitably destined for success, because “its failure is unimaginable.”