This Week in Healthcare: 8/24 – 8/28

Top new from around the healthcare industry:

Louisiana: Planned Parenthood Sues to Keep Medicaid Payments
Planned Parenthood asked a federal judge Tuesday to stop Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration from ending Medicaid payments to the organization’s Louisiana clinics.

More than 80% of healthcare IT leaders say their systems have been compromised
Eighty-one percent of healthcare executives say their organizations have been compromised by at least one malware, botnet or other kind of cyberattack during the past two years, according to a survey by KPMG.

Zoom Wants Health Care to Be More Like Visiting An Apple Store 
In 2006, Dave Sanders, a Portland Oregon-based M.D., co-founded a network of walk-in clinics called Zoomcare to offer exactly that. Zoomcare wasn’t exactly Uber-esque, but it was like Starbucks or Chipotle: convenient, consistent, and affordable without coming off as "cheap." After successfully expanding into Vancouver and Seattle, Zoomcare’s creators decided to take a shot at expanding this "user experience" to more than just basic preventive care.

An Inside Look at the Digital Health Care Revolution [Video]
WellnessFX Co-Founder Jim Kean discusses the digital revolution in health care. He speaks on "Market Makers."

Have a great weekend! 

This Week in Healthcare: 6/8 – 6/12

Top news from around the healthcare industry this week: 

Walgreens, MDLive expand telehealth collaboration to three more states 
Walgreens has expanded its relationship with telehealth service provider MDLive, bringing remote physician access to customers in three new states and, for the first time, to PCs as well as mobile devices. Users of Walgreens mobile apps and the walgreens.com portal in Colorado, Illinois and Washington state now can consult 24/7 with board-certified MDLive physicians for $49 per encounter, the two companies announced Tuesday.

Outraged, engaged patient takes aim at paternalistic physician 
It’s hard to know how many patients out there are truly “empowered,” and I suspect it is a relatively small number, but one of the louder voices out there is Duncan Cross, a longtime engaged patient with Crohn’s disease.

Arizona hospitals, doctors avoid 5 percent Medicaid pay cut 
Arizona hospitals, doctors and other health providers will get a reprieve after the state's Medicaid program announced it will cancel a planned 5 percent payment cut because of lower-than-expected use among enrollees and a prescription-drug rebate.

One nation, under sedation: Medicare paid for nearly 40 million tranquilizer prescriptions in 2013 
In 2012, Medicare’s massive prescription drug program didn’t spend a penny on popular tranquilizers such as Valium, Xanax and Ativan. The following year, it doled out more than $377 million for the drugs. While it might appear that an epidemic of anxiety swept the nation’s Medicare enrollees, the spike actually reflects a failed policy initiative by Congress.

Game Changer: CMS’ Proposed Medicaid Managed Care Regulation 
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released its long awaited Medicaid managed care proposed rules on May 26; the rules were published in the Federal Register on June 1 (80 Fed. Reg. 30198-31297). The last time the federal government seriously tackled Medicaid managed care was in a 2002 regulation (67 Fed. Reg. 40989, June 14), a response to the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 (Pub. L. 105-33), which itself amounted to a major new chapter in Medicaid’s relationship to what by then had become known as managed care.


Happy reading! Have a great weekend. 

Health Care Insights | Weekly Round Up

Health Care Insights brings you your weekly healthcare round up. Below you will find relevant articles on key industry topics that we thought our readers would benefit from - enjoy.


 Top Stories:

4 Principles Guiding Healthcare’s Age of Enlightenment
There are many emerging themes and movements driving healthcare innovation and evolution, which is comparable to the Age of Enlightenment with its new discoveries and ways of solving problems.

“There’s no mystery, no magic… you can access all patient data at the bedside“
 Katleen Smedts, Project Manager ICT at University Hospital Antwerp (UZA) and Bernard Algayres, GM Radiology IT EMEA, GE Healthcare, discuss how vendor neutral archiving can improve access to patient data, facilitate clinical collaboration and drive up quality of care.

Experts say Texas needs more than specialized centers to fight Ebola
Dr. Thomas Geisbert, a scientist at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, was at a conference in Germany in 2000 when he and a Canadian collaborator decided to work together on a vaccine against the deadly Ebola virus.

Avalere Analysis: Medicaid Managed Care Enrollment Set to Grow by 13.5 Million
A new analysis from Avalere Health projects that enrollment of Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) beneficiaries in managed care – i.e., state payment of private companies to provide benefits – will increase by 13.5 million individuals from 2013 to 2016.

CMS launches $840M effort to spur medical practice ‘transformation’
The effort, called the Transforming Clinical Practice Initiative, is a first-of-its kind effort from the public sector and large-scale investment dedicated solely to sharing information among physicians. CMS estimates that only about 185,000 of the country’s doctors take part in similar programs that strive to transform industry practices through the use of collaboration and technology.

Relaunched health IT company offers MDs chronic condition patient data between visits
A health IT company that previously provided migraine patient data to pharmaceutical companies, Ubiqi Health, has relaunched as Klio Health. The new business, which CEO Jacqueline Thong started earlier this year,  aggregates data from patients with chronic conditions with the goal of assessing effectiveness of treatment between visits through a portal.


Have a great weekend!