Featured Report: Essential health benefits Reactions to the final rule

This Week's Healthcare Online News

Fierce Health Payer
Essential health benefits: Reactions to the final rule
Feb,21,2013
by+Dina Overland
After the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services released its final rule detailing which benefits insurers must provide in 2014, industry stakeholders had varying reactions. America's Health Insurance Plans applauded the agency's flexible approach to the standard benefits design and its decision to defer to states' benchmark plan selections, but called out the rule's potential impact on cost. "As the reform law is fully implemented, it will be important to keep in mind how the EHB requirement interacts with other provisions in the law that will add to the cost of health care coverage, such as the new health insurance tax and restrictions on age rating," AHIP CEO Karen Ignani said in a statement.
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Modern Healthcare.com
Getting in on the action
Feb,23,2013
By:+Andis Robeznieks
As more payers appear poised to reimburse providers for the care-coordination services provided under the patient-centered medical home model, other players are stepping up their medical home ancillary business services. The Joint Commission made the loudest recent splash when it announced Feb. 20 that it would begin offering the hospitals it accredits an additional certification as a “primary-care medical home” to institutions providing primary-care services in their outpatient departments. Read more:

Fox News
'I don't smoke, Doc': Common lies doctors expect to hear from patients
Feb,20,2013
By:+Staff
It's a rule many residents learn in training. If a patient says he has four drinks a week, consider it eight. The same for cigarettes and illicit drugs, doctors say. The not-so-subtle message underlying the practice: patients lie. "It's just human nature that patients want to please doctors," says Kevin R. Campbell, a cardiologist in Raleigh, N.C. "I've had patients say they quit smoking and yet they come in smelling like tobacco," he adds. "I can throw pills and drugs at patients all day long but if they're still continuing to smoke and that sort of thing it's just not going to help." Patient lies—from half truths and deceptions to bold, blatant lies—are surprisingly common and can be hard to detect in today's hurried medical practices, doctors say. And as many doctors strive to move away from a stern and lecturing stereotype, confronting patients without alienating them can be especially challenging.
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Med City News
Study highlights potential problems for telemedicine expansion
Feb,26,2013
by:+Stephanie Baum
Telemedicine may be seen as a great way to help address the physician shortage and increasing access to care in rural areas, but when it comes to complex problems like patients with implantable devices, not so much. In a study evaluating remote monitoring, more than 50 percent said thy preferred an in-office visit. Technically, the study produced positive results because it showed remote monitoring could catch problems. The three-month study carried out in Portugal focused on 15 people with cardiac implants using Medtronic’s telemedicine system, CareLink, for a follow-on checkup. It showed that remote monitoring picked up nine problems in patients and six were found during in-person visits — two of the patients required admission. None of the problems were described as severe, according to the study published in Telemedicine and eHealth, and referenced by FierceMedicalDevices.
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Web Docs Network



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Being healthy should be a natural right that everyone is entitled to. Lack of access and information or financial limitations should never be allowed to further fuel the fear and uncertainty that prevents one from achieving their highest levels of health.

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Healthcare when you need it, where you need it. We provide individuals unlimited real-time, immediate interaction with a national network of physicians via web-cam. phone or secure e-mail. Access 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.

Inviter's Name: Keith Berggren
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As Pinterest audience rises to 15% of Internet users, are healthcare and pharma presence growing too?

This Week's Healthcare Online News
Med City News
As Pinterest audience rises to 15% of Internet users, are healthcare and pharma presence growing too?
February 18, 2013
by Stephanie Baum
Pinterest has reached a milestone in its growth. According to a Pew Internet report, the percentage of Internet users that view and post images on the picture-led social network rivals Twitter (15 percent for Pinterest vs. Twitter’s 16 percent). But what are the implications for the healthcare industry? The number of hospitals that at the very least have a Pinterest account has certainly increased in the past year since the last time I took a serious look. There are 42 children’s hospitals alone. I counted 50 health systems. The Mayo Clinic and its affiliates have seven separate accounts. The Cleveland Clinic is up there too. And providers like Tufts Medical Center are making much greater use of video. On a board devoted to cancer, a physician in one video describes signs and symptoms of skin cancer, another board details various heart conditions, another provides warning signs of a stroke.
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Fierce Health IT
CHIME CEO: How health IT can save the economy
Feb,15,2013
By:+Dan Bowman
Although increasing membership and bolstering public policy efforts are top of mind for newly named College of Healthcare Information Management Executives CEO Russell Branzell, he has loftier goals for the organization--and the health IT industry. "We have a duty and an obligation to help transform healthcare through the application of HIT," Branzell (right) told FierceHealthIT in an exclusive interview. "On an even more macro level, HIT, by saving healthcare, will be responsible for saving our national economy. That might sound grandiose, but I really think I need to take my role that seriously."
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MobiHealthNews
Free online weight loss community SparkPeople improves outcomes in peer-reviewed study
Feb,19,2013
by:+Jonah Comstock
A researcher at the University of Texas has published a study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research looking at efficacy of a free online weight loss program. The study looked at 1,258 randomly selected users of SparkPeople.com and found that those who entered their weight into the site at least four times per month lost an average of 11 pounds per month more than those that didn’t, and those who made at least one post on the site’s forum during the time they used the site lost over three pounds more than those that didn’t. (Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the weight entry as four times total, rather than per month.)
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iHealthBeat
Walmart, Sam's Club To Deploy 2,500 Self-Service Health Kiosks
Feb,20,2013
by:+Staff
Self-service kiosks that aim to boost consumer health are being deployed in thousands of stores across the U.S., Kasier Health News reports.

Kiosk Details
Next month, Walmart and Sam's Club are scheduled to debut 2,500 of the kiosks developed by Duluth, Ga.-based SoloHealth.

The kiosks will offer consumers access to various health tests, such as: Blood pressure;
Eye sight;
Obesity.

The devices also can advise patients on:
Diet;
Locating a doctor;
Pain management;
Vitamins.
Read more

Web Docs Network

We provide unlimited access to U.S. licensed physicians via web-cam, phone, or secure e-mail. Immediate access available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Being healthy should be a natural right that everyone is entitled to. Lack of access and information or financial limitations should never be allowed to further fuel the fear and uncertainty that prevents one from achieving their highest levels of health.

WebDocsNetwork was created to make life easier, better, and most importantly, healthier. To re-distribute healthcare and improve quality and access for everyone. Our vision and mission is to provide people from all over the globe, access to U.S. licensed, board-certified physicians.

Healthcare when you need it, where you need it. We provide individuals unlimited real-time, immediate interaction with a national network of physicians via web-cam. phone or secure e-mail. Access 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.

Inviter's Name: Keith Berggren
Join Now at http://www.webdocsnetwork.com/chicago

Families Push for Better Sharing of Health Care Research Information

This Week's Online Healthcare News
iHealthbeat
Feb,20,2013
By;+Wall Street Journal

Families Push for Better Sharing of Health Care Research Information
Parents of children with rare and debilitating diseases are urging researchers to share their patient data so children are not required to participate in so many studies, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Background
In the early stage of research, natural-history studies are used to gain better insight into how diseases progress without treatment and to track different symptoms. Because the pool of people with rare diseases is small, patients often are needed to participate in multiple studies.

In a conference call last month, Stuart and Jennifer Siedman -- who have a 16-year-old son with Sanfilippo syndrome -- told researchers that fatigue, emotions and travel challenges take a toll on participants in natural-history studies. Federal agencies -- such as NIH and FDA -- also have begun to support the idea of encouraging researchers to share patients' medical data.

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Health Data Management
The Individuals Underlying Population Health
Feb,20,2013
By:+Elizabeth Gardner
Population health starts and ends with individuals. Carol Cain, director of clinical integration for the Permanente Federation and Kaiser Permanente’s Care Management Institute plans to illustrate that point using her audience as an example.

“We’re starting to collect exercise data on every visit,” she says, referring to the millions of members that Kaiser serves. “We can tell folks who don’t have any medical conditions that, based on our data, they are likely to get a medical condition in three to five years if they don’t exercise. We can look at their needs for staying active, and then think about a care delivery program that would respond to those. If you have two jobs and two kids at home, that’s the universe you live in and we won’t get anywhere pretending that you’re going to go running.” She plans to end her session by getting the audience to analyze the individual and collective needs of the group “people who attend conferences.”
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Med City News
U.S. to operate 26 state health exchanges with little local help
Feb,19, 2013
By:+Staff
WASHINGTON, Feb 19 (Reuters) - The Obama administration said on Tuesday that it will operate federal online health insurance marketplaces in 26 of the 50 U.S. states with little or no input from local state officials.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that a total of 24 states, including six with Republican governors, plus the District of Columbia, are on track to run their own marketplaces, known as healthcare exchanges, or to do so in partnership with the federal government.
The new tally, which follows a Feb. 15 deadline for states to request a federal partnership exchange, underscores the logistical challenge facing the administration as it moves to set up federal marketplaces less than eight months before the Oct. 1 opening of plan enrollment.
"No matter where a qualified consumer lives, he or she will have access to coverage through a marketplace," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a government blog post.
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Modern Healthcare
The charity offering
Despite disparity in margins, rich and poor hospitals offer similar levels of subsidized care
Feb,16,2013
By+Melanie Evans
n 2010, Memorial Medical Center, a small hospital in rural San Augustine, Texas, saw its financial losses grow along with demand from patients who could not afford to pay. The hospital's subsidies for free medical care to low-income patients swallowed 4.5% of its budget by the end of the year.
One of Oklahoma's largest hospitals spent a similar share of its fiscal 2010 budget—roughly 5%—to cover the cost of medical care for patients who were unable to pay. But St. John's Medical Center in Tulsa did so with one enviable difference: The hospital finished 2010 solidly in the black with a margin of 10.8%.
Both are among the roughly 60% of private U.S. hospitals that receive local, state and federal tax breaks in exchange for operations that benefit the community.

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Web Docs Network

We provide unlimited access to U.S. licensed physicians via web-cam, phone, or secure e-mail. Immediate access available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Being healthy should be a natural right that everyone is entitled to. Lack of access and information or financial limitations should never be allowed to further fuel the fear and uncertainty that prevents one from achieving their highest levels of health.
WebDocsNetwork was created to make life easier, better, and most importantly, healthier. To re-distribute healthcare and improve quality and access for everyone. Our vision and mission is to provide people from all over the globe, access to U.S.
licensed, board-certified physicians. Healthcare when you need it, where you need it. We provide individuals unlimited real-time, immediate interaction with a national network of physicians via web-cam. phone or secure e-mail. Access 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.

Inviter's Name: Keith Berggren
Join Now at http://www.webdocsnetwork.com/chicago

Study Finds Similar Outcomes From Online, In-Person Doctor Visits

Study Finds Similar Outcomes From Online, In-Person Doctor Visits
Online physician consultations for uncomplicated conditions produce similar outcomes as in-person office visits, according to a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, Reuters reports.

Study Details
For the study, researchers compared data on physician e-visits and in-person doctors' visits for patients with sinus infections and urinary tract infections between January 2010 and May 2011. Of the more than 8,000 consultations examined in the study, more than 90% occurred in person

Key Findings
The study found that for both groups, 7% or less of patients returned to the doctor within three weeks for the same condition, suggesting that online consultations did not have higher rates of misdiagnosis or treatment failure. In addition, the researchers estimated that treating a patient with a UTI cost an average of $74 per e-visit, compared with $93 per office visit. The researchers wrote, "There are several potential advantages of e-visits, including convenience and efficiency (avoiding travel and time), and lower costs," as well as allowing patients to meet with their primary care physician instead of emergency department doctors. Read Report at iHealthbeat