Practice Management
Last week we told you about Humana’s plans to drop out of Affordable Care Act (ACA, or “Obamacare”) insurance exchanges in certain states. Now the company has revealed that one of those states is Alabama—leaving just one ACA exchange in the entire state, effective Dec. 31, 2016. The other states (so far) are Kansas, Wisconsin, and Virginia, though news regarding more states may still be ahead. The company first said it would consider exiting certain …
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Probably more than for any other setting, patients rely on information they find online before deciding to visit an urgent care clinic. If you have stellar reviews on Yelp or other online review platforms, you’re in good shape, but the randomness of such sources can be a problem. Sentara Healthcare took matters into its own hands by surveying its own urgent care patients, resulting in 10,000 responses, and posting their results online. Working with National …
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Physician assistants in Ohio now have more authority to make decisions—including more freedom to prescribe drugs—under a new law signed into effect by Gov. John Kasich. While PAs still must work under the supervision of a physician, they have more autonomy when it comes to ordering diagnostics, prescribing or directly providing medications, and administering local anesthesia. While urgent care centers typically have physicians on site most or all of the time, retail clinics like those …
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Physicians who prescribe opioid pain medications would have to undergo a higher level of specific training under a guidance recommended by a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel. In response to a perceived epidemic of opioid addiction and related deaths, the panel voted unanimously to advice requiring more education about the drugs’ risks. The panel’s vote was unanimous, but not binding—though the FDA does often follow recommendations made by its outside expert panels.
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In advance of formal approval of its merger with Aetna, Humana plans to stop participating in some state insurance exchanges constructed under the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or “Obamacare”). The company says its member base dropped 21% compared with the first quarter of 2015. That includes those who bought policies under the ACA exchanges, which many insurers say are hard on their bottom lines to begin with. UnitedHealth Group was the first major insurer to …
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IMS Health Holdings Inc. and Quintiles Transnational Holdings are merging in an all-stock deal aimed at creating “a leading portfolio of anonymous patient records, technology-enabled data collection, and observational research experts to address critical healthcare issues of cost, value, and patient outcomes.” The new company, to be called Quintiles IMS Holdings, says its combined strength will be to support drug development from inception through demonstrating the value of new medicines. The 2015 combined revenue of …
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The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) calls it a brand-new platform, while skeptics are saying it’s just the same-old structure with a fresh coat of paint. Either way, CMS is rolling out the Quality Payment Program, which it says will ease documentation requirements for physicians while also providing new opportunities to earn bonuses by providing quality care. Under the program, physicians can receive Medicare reimbursement by participating in either the Merit-Based Incentive Payment …
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We’ve seen lots of data indicating that patients worry about being able to afford good healthcare for themselves and their families. Those concerns go beyond the household budget, though: A new study shows that citizens are more concerned about domestic healthcare costs than any other financial issue. In fact, “healthcare costs” were named by nearly twice as many people as Social Security benefits, which was the second most mentioned concern (31% vs 16%), followed by …
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Patient advocates and regulators at every level decry that a lack of price transparency often leads to patients getting bigger bills than they expected after leaving a doctor’s office. However, a new study published in Health Affairs calls the actual value of price transparency tools into question—if for no other reason than it’s unclear how often patients would actually use such a tool. Researchers looked at how a population of Aetna members fared using that …
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Most patients who gave their healthcare providers low scores after an encounter did so because of perceived bad service, not poor medical care, according to a new study published in the Journal of Medical Practice Management. In fact, 96% of complaints in an analysis of 35,000 online reviews were related mainly to communication and wait times. Just 1 in 25 patients who gave their provider one or two stars (on a five-star scale) said they …
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