Strategic Planning

Coordination is critical to successfully fending off cybercriminals, Intermountain Healthcare CIO and College of Healthcare Information Management Executives Board Chair Marc Probst told a congressional panel on Wednesday.

With the shortage of primary care providers already severe in some areas of the country, a recent study published in Health Affairs has found that 58 percent of retail clinic cases were new visits, which drove about a $14-per-person annual net increase in spending.

As margins are squeezed, interest in provider-sponsored health plans continues to increase. The expectation, according to a new PwC report, is that half of health systems will be applying or will consider applying for an insurance license.

The nation in the next few years faces many important decisions about health care -- most of which have little to do with the controversial federal health law. Here are five issues candidates should be discussing, but largely are not.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality will dedicate nearly $2 million for the creation of the PCOR Clinical Decision Support Learning Network, aiming to address the barriers hindering the incorporation of patient-centered outcomes research into CDS tools.

The study sought to measure whether having access to such a tool, and with it more price information, was associated with a reduction in annual outpatient spending in the first 12 months after the tool was introduced.

Pamela Peele knows that people who subscribe to cooking magazines have a much higher risk of going to the emergency room. But how she knows that is a whole other story.

Instead of slashing jobs to cut costs and increase profits, hospitals should focus on delivering high-quality customer experiences to widen their margins. That's the word from a new study released by Accenture, which shows that hospitals who delivered superior customer experiences increased their net margins by 50 percent over average-performing facilities.

The vice president took to the stage at Health Datapalooza not just to share his own experiences, but to put out a call to action: While the government has taken great strides to increase access to technology-enabled healthcare, it's still not enough, he said.

Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan is poised to become the latest proton therapy center in the United States having recently scored a Proteus One Gantry system that precisely directs cancer-killing proton beams at tumors.