In states where Medicaid pays doctors higher fees for office visits, Medicaid beneficiaries are more likely to be screened for breast, cervical or colorectal cancer, according to a new study. "States tend to vary in their reimbursement rates for different types of medical care services; some states may have low reimbursements for certain services and higher reimbursements for others," said lead author Dr. Michael T. Halpern of the Division of Health Services and Social Policy Research at RTI International at Washington, D.C. Medicaid, a health insurance program for low-income individuals, is jointly funded by the federal government and the individual states. Each state establishes its own coverage and reimbursement policies.
To meet Stage 2 Meaningful Use criteria, hospitals and physicians will most likely implement patient portals. There really are no good alternatives to portals to efficiently meet the requirement to provide electronic access to patient records and lab results within the specified time frames (four days for physician office visits, 36 hours for inpatient hospital stays). Also, portals can help streamline patient registration and appointment setting, which benefits both patients and healthcare providers. A variety of surveys over the past couple of years indicate that patients like these portals and that they influence patient satisfaction with physicians and hospitals. So portals will likely be a part of your relationship with patients.
Your chances of getting a MRSA infection in a Tennessee hospital are 12 percent greater than they should be, according to a state report. But you're much more likely to get a urinary tract infection if you end up in an intensive-care unit — where the odds are 40 percent higher than the national hospital standard. The statistics are revealed in the most recent Tennessee's Report on Healthcare-Associated Infections, which also provides raw numbers for the first six months of 2013. There is positive news in the report: Tennessee hospitals are doing a good job at preventing deadly bloodstream infections. The odds of getting one in a Tennessee hospital are significantly lower than the national standard.
Indiana law gives you the right to know how much public employees make. A quick database search on the Indiana Gateway for Government Units is all it takes to see just how much money every teacher, police officer and city council member brought home last year. Right now, the database includes doctors and staff at county hospitals. But the Indiana Hospital Association is trying to change that. County hospitals say they're put at a disadvantage when they have to make doctor salaries publicly available, said Spence Grover, vice president of IHA. Doing so gives private hospitals they compete with access to internal information from their publicly owned competitors, but the reverse isn't true.
When a federal appeals court ruled last month that a seemingly arcane wording flaw in the Affordable Care Act should invalidate a central part of the law, many of those who drafted the statute five years ago reacted with shock and anger. In 2009, they had spent months piecing together a compromise that sought to create a national system of subsidized insurance — but one run by the states. Now, they fear their work could be undone by what some call a "drafting error" and others portray as a political miscalculation.
An investigation by the watchdog office for the Department of Veterans Affairs has been unable to substantiate allegations that 40 veterans may have died because of delays in care at the veterans medical center in Phoenix, according to a letter from the new secretary of Veterans Affairs. The allegations of deaths created a national scandal that eventually led to the ouster of the previous secretary of Veterans Affairs, Eric Shinseki. Outrage over the manipulation of waiting list data in Phoenix and other veterans medical centers also led to passage by Congress of a $15 billion plan to improve access to medical providers.