Accountable Care
As healthcare and technology professionals gather to share strategies for optimizing revenue cycle management in a challenging and fast-changing reimbursement environment, Healthcare IT News' sister publication Healthcare Finance offers live updates.
In a deal that will have implications for rural and community hospitals as well as the post-acute care market, Computer Programs and Systems announced Nov. 25 that it would acquire rival Healthland Holding and its affiliates for $250 million.
As ICD-10 looms, value-based reimbursement remains clouded in uncertainty and many technology vendors under-deliver on their promises, more and more hospitals are outsourcing their revenue cycle management processes.
As part of the Transforming Clinical Practice Initiative, HHS will dole out $685 million more to help health networks, group practices and other providers drive IT-enabled care coordination, quality improvement and cost reduction.
Use of analytics by large hospitals and health systems is on the rise, and should continue to grow -- although "perhaps not as dramatically or rapidly" as some might hope, according to a new Deloitte survey of CIOs and CMIOs.
With the increasing adoption of data analytics, providers, health plans and ACOs are quickly transitioning toward a coordinated, integrated and value-based care delivery ecosystem. That's not always an easy task.
Kyra Bobinet, MD, says a doctor can look at all the vital signs, test results, images and assorted assorted other EMR data and still have no idea how to treat a patient. "That's not real life," she says. "That's not how to care for people."
Kaiser Permanente engages 45 percent of its more than 9 million members through online portals, which offer EHR access and secure physician-patient email. But not all providers are able to demonstrate such healthy numbers.
Following two years of considerable financial losses, one health system is considering dropping out of the CMS Pioneer ACO program altogether.
Analytics firm Inovalon, which develops cloud-based intervention technology for payers, physicians and ACOs, will acquire Avalere Health, which provides advisory services and business intelligence tools to the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries.