The federal government will spend $840 million over the next four years to help doctors move their practices away from a volume-based business model to one that's focused on rewarding them for good patient outcomes. That's one of the goals of the Affordable Care Act, which provided the funding for the Department of Health and Human Services' Transforming Clinical Practice Initiative. The program aims to improve the coordination of patient care by primary care doctors and specialists, expand the use of electronic health records, give doctors better access to patient information, and expand the ways patients can communicate with the team of physicians caring for them.
A team of researchers studying the safety hazards of electronic health record (EHR) systems suggests there may be lessons to be learned from the Ebola scare, even though the Dallas hospital where a man died and infected two healthcare workers swiftly retracted its claim that its EHR was at fault. Despite that backtracking, the facts of the case align with a common pattern of medical errors where the use of EHRs is, if not the sole cause, often an aggravating factor, according to Hardeep Singh, chief of the health policy, quality, and informatics program at the Veterans Affairs Center for Innovations in Quality, Effectiveness, and Safety, based at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center in Houston, and an associate professor at Baylor College of Medicine.
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell is calling on thousands of family physicians across the country to boost ObamaCare sign-ups, less than one month before open enrollment begins. "We're going to need your help and your support just as much as we did last year, if not more," Burwell said in prepared remarks to the American Academy of Family Physicians. "We hope you'll encourage [your patients] to stay covered, and we hope you'll encourage any uninsured patients to go ahead and take that important step and get covered," she said.
In a letter to a friend, the manager of a Florida urology practice worried in 2010 that her company would attract federal scrutiny for its frequent use of an expensive bladder-cancer test. The manager's concern involved a program at 21st Century Oncology Holdings Inc.—a national chain of cancer practices—that gives its urologists a financial incentive to order the test from a central in-house lab. A federal law since the 1990s has prohibited "self-referral," in which doctors can profit from Medicare-reimbursed procedures they order. But 21st Century Oncology and many physician groups around the country have found ways to do it anyway, exploiting an exception to the law in ways its writers didn't anticipate. [Subscription Required]
People who search and compare the prices of common healthcare services tend to spend a bit less than people who don't, according to a new study. The overall amount of money people and their employers spent on office visits, laboratory services and imaging tests was between $1 and $125 less than normal when they looked up the prices ahead of time, researchers found. "It makes sense," said the study's lead author Christopher Whaley, from the University of California, Berkeley. "If you give them the information on services, they respond to it." He and his colleagues write in JAMA that people are paying a bit more of their own healthcare costs after recent changes to the U.S. healthcare insurance market.
Taxpayer information given to the state-based insurance exchanges created by ObamaCare could be at risk, according to a new federal audit. The Treasury Department's inspector general for tax administration said in a report released Thursday that the IRS needs to boost its efforts to ensure that taxpayer data are protected. Currently, the report said, the tax agency doesn't get enough assurances that tax information is safe before releasing it to the state exchanges. "The IRS must do more to ensure that federal tax information submitted to the ACA [Affordable Care Act] exchanges is protected and prevent its unauthorized disclosure," said Russell George, the inspector general for tax administration.