The Obama administration on Monday showed off the federal Web site, Healthcare.gov, where millions of Americans starting Tuesday will be able to buy coverage under President Obama's health-care law, promising it will be open for business despite congressional battling and widespread reports of computer problems. People seeking to buy health insurance on the federal marketplace will be able to enter personal information, including their incomes and Social Security numbers; learn how much government assistance they might qualify for, if any; search for plans by price and coverage level; and then purchase a plan directly from the insurance company.
Baylor Health Care System and Scott & White Healthcare on Monday completed their merger deal, forming the largest not-for-profit health system in Texas with more than $8 billion in assets and about $6 billion in annual revenue. "Over time, patients in the communities we serve will begin seeing the new brand Baylor Scott & White Health emerge," Joel Allison, chief executive officer, Baylor Scott & White Health, said in a statement. "We are building a new national model for health care delivery engineered to meet the demands of health care reform, the changing needs of patients and payers and the extraordinary advances in clinical care."
(Reuters) - The world faces a rapidly growing burden of cancer which will overwhelm governments unless the medical and pharma industry takes the lead on a multi-billion dollar private-public fund, oncologists said on Monday. In a report on how rates of cancer diagnosis and death are rising across the world while access to diagnosis and treatment is extremely patchy, experts described the economics of the problem as daunting and current financing models as broken. "It is bad to have cancer, and worse to have cancer if you are poor," said Professor Peter Boyle of France's International Prevention Research Institute, a lead author on the "State of Oncology 2013" report.
Hospital executives have traditionally paid little attention to customer care, but the Affordable Care Act is going to change that, insiders say. Hospitals and health care systems can take note of basic best practices implemented by the most magical place on earth, said Steven Sullivan, vice president of Pearl Meyer & Partners LLC, an executive compensation consulting firm in Houston. In fact, it's in their best interest to do so, he said. I've never been to Disney World myself, but have heard it's magic.
HCA has secured the backing of both key boards at Citrus Memorial Hospital in a bid to take control of the health care facility. The Citrus Memorial Hospital Foundation Board voted 7-1 in HCA's favor, following a 4-0 vote by the Citrus Hospital Board, said J.C. Sadler, vice president of marketing and communications for HCA West Florida. The exact nature of the transaction has yet to be determined, according to the Citrus Chronicle. The hospital board wants a lease, while the foundation favors a sale, the Chronicle reported.
T minus 12 months and counting until physicians and hospitals must comply with the federal government's October 1, 2014 deadline to implement the ICD-10 system for classifying diseases. Developed by the World Health Organization, its predecessor ICD-9 has been in place since the late 1970s. It lists no fewer than 13,000 billable codes, which include such exotic diagnoses as "injury from fall while occupying spacecraft" and "exposure to fireball effects of nuclear weapon." The U.S. clinical modification of ICD-10 will include no fewer than 68,000 codes. These changes are emblematic of a plague of complexification sweeping across healthcare.