Collecting and reporting infection data to federal health agencies is not the soundest strategy, according to a new research effort. Collecting and reporting infection data to federal health agencies is not the soundest strategy, according to a new research effort. Infection preventionists at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Somerset (Somerville, N.J.) tabulated the time it […]

Unauthorized immigrants pay billions more into Medicare’s Hospital Insurance Trust Fund each year than they withdraw in health benefits, according to research from Harvard Medical School, the Institute for Community Health and the City University of New York School of Public Health at Hunter College. Read more from originating source…

Patients rehospitalized with complications after major surgery are 26% more likely to survive if they return to the hospital where they had their operation compared to those readmitted to a different hospital, according to a national study involving over 9 million Medicare patients in the USA, published in The Lancet. Read more from originating source…

Although a goal of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act was to provide Medicaid patients with a source of nonemergency care outside of hospital emergency departments (EDs), researchers suggest that these newly enrolled patients will likely continue to look to EDs for treatment of chronic diseases and other nonemergency issues, despite state attempts to […]

As the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services begins to sort through the comments it’s received on the proposed “flexibility” rule softening Stages 1 and 2 of Meaningful Use for… read more Read more from originating source…

For years, the Medicare pre­scrip­tion drug ben­efit Part D has been cred­ited with pos­i­tively impacting national trends in health out­comes and med­ical ser­vices. But a recent study led by North­eastern asso­ciate pro­fessor Becky Briesacher chal­lenges that assump­tion and sug­gests that the U.S. Con­gres­sional Budget Office’s adopted a new costing method based on assumed cost-savings may […]

Several healthcare IT groups have submitted comments and offered suggestions in response to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) proposed meaningful use modifications from 2015-2017 that it laid out earlier this year. Several healthcare IT groups have submitted comments and offered suggestions in response to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) […]

There has been some support for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ proposed rule softening some of the requirements of the Meaningful Use program for 2015 through 2017, but commenters have also raised a number of concerns about it. read more Read more from originating source…