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The winners of the first annual Editor’s Choice Awards were announced at the 3rd Annual World Healthcare Innovation and Technology Congress (WHIT 3.0). The victors were revealed Sunday, Dec. 9, at the conference’s networking gala at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington. The awards are co-sponsored by WHIT 3.0 and Health Data Management. more»

No, this isn't another story about Unified Communications, cellular phones, or even healthcare's most wired hospitals. It's about a keynote address I attended this morning at the World Healthcare Innovation and IT Congress in Washington, D.C., at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. more»

More hospitals are selling uncollectible bad debt to companies that specialize in those efforts. Such debt sales, while only for a small percentage of the value of the original amount owed, bring a large check to a facility and clear long-standing debt off an organization’s ledgers. more»

Hospitals are seeing an increase in self-paying customers, increasing the stakes for collections and holding the potential to increase days in accounts receivable. A panel of collection managers from hospitals, speaking at the recent Leadership Summit on Revenue Cycle Innovations in Chicago in late September, said their data indicates more patients are shouldering larger portions of their medical expenses. more»

Speakers lined up for the first Leadership Forum on Medical Tourism say the industry could prompt a movement to transparency in healthcare pricing.

Key topics that the forum will discuss include: a critique of the U.S. healthcare system, healthcare pricing transparency; risk management/liability issues; the relationship between health insurance and medial tourism; accreditation; standards and quality guidelines; and future trends in medical tourism. more»

Of course, chances are slim that US payouts would ever reach this level. However, Gorden, who attended the 5th World Congress Healthcare Quality and P4P conference in Boston on August 6-8, says that less than half of the British bonus would be enough to grab US providers' attention. "When it starts being in the 5% to 10% range, that seems to be the sweet point for getting physicians to be seriously interested in participating," he said. more»

. . .another CMS official told the audience at a recent World Congress pay-for-performance summit in Boston that the agency placed great weight on comments from the field and public before it issued the final rule. more»

According to Ron Anderson M.D., CEO and President of the Parkland Health and Hospital System in Dallas Texas, the increasing demand for services resulting from patient and poverty populations puts a strain on the current system. Speaking at the 2007 Public Health Congress held on July 16-18 in Washington D.C., he elaborated on the need to erase cultural barriers in treating patients, develop a strong public health service, and the necessity to develop a wellness system. more»

In the UK, three year old Isabel Maude was diagnosed with chicken pox, but after the initial diagnosis, Isabel’s illness took a strange turn. Isabel developed a high fever, vomiting, diarrhea, severe pain, and discoloration of the chicken pox rash. Follow-up visits to the doctor and the emergency room reassured the parents that everything was normal and there was nothing to worry about. Like most parents they trusted the physician’s opinions and waited for her to improve. more»

Christopher Koller, Rhode Island’s Health Insurance Commissioner, speaking at the Public Health Congress on July 16, 2007 in Washington D.C., said “the Governor’s goal is to have health IT for the majority of individuals in the state by 2010.” To help move health IT forward, the state issued a Request for Proposal on July 11th to form a RHIO to manage the contract with the State’s health information exchange vendor. The RFP is due on August 28, 2007. more»

Privacy should not be considered an “obstacle” to patient data sharing and it is not a trade-off for electronic records, according to speakers at The Road to Interoperability conference held in Boston last week. more»

Lack of agreement on IT standards also is frustrating health leaders. At the World Health Care Congress in April, Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen called for a set of realistic standards: "Enough with grants and pilot programs," he insisted, in urging action by the healthcare community. Similarly, Reed Tuckson, chief of medical affairs for UnitedHealth Group, blasted the proliferation of performance measurement initiatives as likely to drive healthcare costs "through the roof." more»

Rural healthcare systems don't measure up when compared to their urban counterparts, several health-sector experts say. "We have an inequitable system across the country," said Michael Meit, co-director of the Walsh Center for Rural Health Analysis, a division of the National Opinion Research Center, a non-profit organization affiliated with the University of Chicago. more»

A burgeoning industry of wellness advisers, counselors and consultants is booming as corporate America tries to increase productivity and control insurance costs by helping its employees get healthy and shed pounds. more»

Consumerism cannot succeed unless the nation's top two purchasers of health care - private employers and the federal government - demand that individuals have electronic access to their information and stop doing business with providers who don't comply, according to executives from Intel, Google and Microsoft, who participated in a panel discussion on consumerism during the World Health Care Congress in Washington, D.C., this spring. more»

Dr. Linda Springer Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, oversees eight million enrollees requiring coverage for healthcare. Her priorities are to provide the best possible care at the lowest cost, provide choices for insurance plans, and at the same time, protect the employee’s personal data. Dr. Springer presented her views at the 4th Annual World Health Care Congress co-sponsored by the Wall Street Journal on April 22-24 in Washington D.C. more»

More than half of the California physicians involved in a year-old pay-for-performance consortium have reported using new healthcare information technology to schedule patient visits and appointment reminders. more»

Quality measurement and pay-for-performance are not without their problems, said participants of a panel chaired yesterday at the World Health Care Congress by a Thomas Valuck, MD, JD, the director of Value-Based Purchasing at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. more»

A panel on competition, moderated by John Iglehart, the founding editor of Health Affairs, included Michael Porter, a Harvard professor and a leading authority on competitive strategy, who said that 21st-century medicine is being delivered with 19th-century organisation and management. What's called for, he said, is a fundamental restructuring of health systems rather than incremental improvement, and an emphasis on value and on health outcomes per dollar spent. more»