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By: Janice Simmons, for HealthLeaders Media, May 26, 2009
If current federal healthcare reform efforts fall flat in Congress, businesses in 2019 could find their health costs doubled and 65.7 million people could end up uninsured under a worst-case scenario, according to projections from researchers at the Urban Institute in Washington.
By: Janice Simmons, for HealthLeaders Media, May 26, 2009
Nearly 10 years ago, the Institute of Medicine released its report To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System, which put a spotlight on problems surrounding patient safety. Last week, a panel of providers and policymakers who initially experienced firsthand the impact of that report—which estimated that upward of 98,000 people died each year in hospitals due to medical errors—had a chance to reflect how the report exceeded or fell short of expectations during the intervening years at a meeting of the National Patient Safety Foundation Annual Congress outside of Washington.
By: Cheryl Clark, for HealthLeaders Media, May 22, 2009
California soon may become the first state in the nation to set a maximum number of hours a health plan enrollee may wait before getting in to see a doctor. Needless to say, physician and health plan groups are not happy about it.
By: Lisa Eramo, for HealthLeaders Media, May 22, 2009
By now, most hospitals know of the impending 2013 implementation deadline for ICD-10. What they may not know, however, is that there is an even earlier compliance deadline necessary to make the transition possible.
By: Dom Nicastro, for HealthLeaders Media, May 22, 2009
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology issued a report May 18 that highlights how it will carry out HIPAA privacy and security regulations in the HITECH Act. Is it merely the same information from HITECH, but said a different way?
By: MacKenzie Kimball , for HealthLeaders Media, May 26, 2009
An updated version of the Minimum Data Set 3.0 Draft Item Set appeared on CMS' Web site May 7 and an initial analysis revealed significant changes from the previous draft. Some key changes featured in the updated MDS 3.0 draft include the MDS 2.0 two-column coding format for activities of daily living self-performance and support provided, which was omitted from the previous draft, is in the updated version.
By: Philip Betbeze, for HealthLeaders Media, May 22, 2009
A new study has confirmed that in some cases, patients at household-name hospitals received worse care than they might have at their local community hospital.