Strategic Planning

At its annual meeting this week, the American Medical Association adopted new policies encourage physicians to co-prescribe naloxone to patients at risk of an overdose; promote timely and appropriate access to non-opioid and non-pharmacologic treatments for pain; and support efforts to delink payments to healthcare facilities with patient satisfaction scores relating to the evaluation and management of pain.

Physicians gathered at the Annual Meeting of the American Medical Association have voted for David Barbe, M.D., M.H.A., a family physician from Mountain Grove, Missouri, to be the group's next president-elect, according to the physician organization.

Support for women's health care, along with family planning resources, has been dramatically scaled back, in part because of funding restrictions placed on women's clinics that, in addition to other services, provide abortions. Also, both states declined to expand Medicaid. Those decisions, many advocates say, are putting a squeeze on the health care system's ability to educate women about Zika's risks and minimize its impact.

Starting salaries for both primary care physicians and specialists have shot up in the last 12 months, according to a 2016 report by Merritt Hawkins, a physician search firm and subsidiary of AMN Healthcare. The spike represents a rising demand for physicians and amid the growing doctor shortage, Merritt Hawkins said.

Medical University of South Carolina has chosen Avantas to deliver system-wide workforce planning services that include predictive analytics, scheduling software and centralized resource management. MUSC Health expects this will optimize the health system's core and contingent labor, the companies announced on Wednesday.

With the newly-announced Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative Data Challenge, the foundation is offering $25,000 to two teams of entrants who'll work with researchers to expand understanding of the disease and improve the rate of drug testing.

The project, named Genomic Data Commons, is a National Cancer Institute initiative and is central to the National Cancer Moonshot and Precision Medicine Initiative.

58 practices in 39 states and the District of Columbia have joined CancerLinQ, the American Society of Clinical Oncology's big data initiative, which seeks to improve the quality of care for people with cancer.

John Clark, population health program manager at UNC Health Care, said direct employer contracts that eliminate intermediaries and can really help a health system contain costs. But the approach comes with some risks.

Community Health Systems will divest 10 of its low-performing hospitals to reduce debt by approximately $975 million, Chairman and CEO Wayne Smith said during a recent earnings call.