News
If you're not using workpooling to distribute work, you may be losing money. That's the message attendees of the Maine chapter of the Healthcare Financial Management Association's annual conference in Rockport, Maine heard last week during a session on work productivity.
Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR), a global investments firm, and the American Heart Association (AHA) have recently teamed up to launch a new research collaboration to study how effective workplace wellness initiatives have been at KKR and four of its portfolio companies.
Timothy Bickmore, associate professor at Northeastern University's College of Computer and Information Science, has been working for the past decade in the area of "relational agents." He says these artificially intelligent avatars are poised for a promising future in healthcare.
Accountable care organizations (ACOs) have shown considerable promise, demonstrating savings and reduced readmission rates, said a recent Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice study.
Nearly 47 percent of California voters over the age of 40 surveyed say a close family member will need long-term care within the next five years, and about as many say they couldn't afford even one month of nursing home costs, according to a poll by the SCAN Foundation and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.
How do you go from a traditional business model to one that is based on volume? That's a question being asked a lot these days in the healthcare industry and one that was addressed during the Maine chapter of the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s annual meeting last week in Rockport, Maine.
National health spending in July grew 4.2 percent relative to July 2011, up from the 3.9 percent growth rate experienced in June, according to the Health Sector Economic Indicators brief released recently by the Altarum Institute’s Center for Sustainable Health Spending.
Fifteen years in the making, Aurora Health Care recently signed on two of Wisconsin’s largest health plans – Aetna and Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield – to its new Aurora Accountable Care Network, which offers a price guarantee to employers and promises average savings of 10 percent based on past claims expenses.
In 2009, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (BCBS) launched the Alternative Quality Contract (AQC), a global payment reimbursement pilot program that rewards participating physician groups for controlling spending and improving quality of care. A Commonwealth Fund-sponsored analysis of the first two years of the five-year pilot has found that such programs may be effective at controlling healthcare spending and improving quality.
On the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Go Direct campaign website is a countdown clock. It isn’t counting down to the end of the Mayan calendar. And although some older adults may view the clock as ticking down to the end of the world as they know it, the Treasury Department and leaders of the long-term care industry say the deadline it’s counting down to will begin a new era of increased efficiency and cost savings.