Implementation of electronic health records (EHRs), compliance with government regulations, and other healthcare IT initiatives are driving up demand for health IT pros these days. But while their pay inched up last year, health IT professionals' compensation still, for the most part, lags behind IT pros across all industries, according to the InformationWeek 2012 IT Salary Survey. However, while health IT managers earned smaller paychecks than IT managers across other industries, healthcare CIOs fared better than CIOs in general. Healthcare IT staffers also did better than healthcare IT managers, whose increases in base pay and total compensation in 2012 over 2011 were slightly smaller than those seen from 2010 to 2011.
Trillium Community Health Plan, which is owned by a group of 300 doctors, has stepped up to partner with Lane County in establishing a new way to provide healthcare to people covered by the Oregon Health Plan—Oregon’s version of Medicaid. Trillium is spearheading the new coordinated care organization, or CCO, in Lane County. Trillium and Lane County made a high-stakes bet when they pooled their know-how and financial reserves to create the CCO. Lane County is putting up $5 million and Trillium is putting up $15 million in reserve funds that could be tapped if the new CCO's budget of $270 million doesn't stretch far enough next year to pay the medical bills for the 55,000 Oregon Health Plan members in Lane County.
Robert Fowler of Seabrook was diagnosed with the blood-borne viral disease in June, 14 months after he underwent a cardiac catheterization at Exeter Hospital. Fowler was treated at the hospital’s cardiac lab a month after it hired David Kwiatkowski, who is accused of stealing anesthetic drugs from the lab, injecting himself and contaminating syringes that were later used on patients. In a lawsuit filed Sunday in federal court in Nebraska, Boston lawyer Domenic Paolini alleges that Triage Staffing Inc. was negligent in hiring, employing and supervising Kwiatkowski as a traveling technician and in sending him to Exeter.
Louisiana lawmakers bristled Monday about getting few details and no ability to decide the $523 million in budget cuts Gov. Bobby Jindal's administration has made to healthcare programs, largely to LSU's safety net healthcare facilities. The cuts are tied to a drop in Louisiana's federal Medicaid funding that was passed in congressional legislation after the state's 2012-13 budget was already crafted. The Jindal administration levied two-thirds of the cuts on the LSU safety-net hospital system, which will lose $329 million, or one-quarter of its entire budget for the fiscal year that began July 1.
IBM officials believe that turning Watson's brainpower onto the medical system can reduce errors and improve the quality of care. Watson can store huge amounts of data ranging from patient health records to cutting-edge treatments. While a doctor may spend 10 hours a week reading the latest advances in medical journals; Watson can read 200 million pages of text in three seconds. IBM began working with managed care company WellPoint last year on a program to automatically pre-authorize certain medical procedures. WellPoint also is working on a Watson project with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles to build decision-making tools for oncologists treating breast, colon and lung cancer.
Specialists from Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital will provide telemedicine services to Fortune 500 companies around the country through a new partnership. The Boston hospitals announced a deal between the Partners HealthCare Center for Connected Health and CHS Health Services Inc., a national workforce health management company specializing in onsite health care services. The new telemedicine offering would be initially geared towards employees in remote offices, who don’t have access to workplace-based healthcare providers. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.