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Along with the changes and new costs coming with health reform, past problems are cropping up for some insurers, even setting regulatory records.

The employer wellness movement is gaining steam globally, but some trends are hitting a wall.

The ACA created the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation to launch experiments in every state, changing the way doctors and hospitals are paid, building networks between caregivers and training them to intervene before chronic illness gets worse, but one of the biggest experiments is the center itself.

Healthcare systems have used value analysis since the 1990s, but the process is gaining more prominence amid the uncertainty created by healthcare reform and other changes in the way hospitals are reimbursed.

From a real estate perspective, the healthcare landscape is dramatically changing. The massive, monolithic structures that have come to represent the acute care setting are becoming more stratified in smaller buildings across wider swaths of a community. As Medicare policy encourages shorter inpatient hospital stays and drives patients into the post-acute care world, the need for colossal facilities is declining, real estate analysts say.

As health systems and hospitals straddle the two worlds of volume and value, it’s tough to know what to do about upgrading revenue cycle management systems.

Hospitals face the decision of leasing or buying equipment on a regular basis. Ultimately, whether to lease or buy comes down to a hospital’s objectives.

U.S. hospitals were already under pressure as a result of healthcare reform legislation and reduced reimbursements. Now declining patient volume is pushing hospitals toward the boiling point.

For many larger healthcare organizations, group purchasing has yielded significant savings. Physician practices are also mulling whether or not they can achieve savings through aggregated procurement.

As providers continue adjusting to the reimbursement changes wrought by the Affordable Care Act, it appears increasingly likely that hospitals will place more emphasis on collecting payments at the point of service.