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Monday, January 27, 2014

Featured Report: New path to Medicare cost control

This Week's Healthcare Online News

HealthDataManagement
5 Payer Tech Trends
Jan,27,2014
by+Staff
Consumer technology for payers continues to grow at record levels and defy expectations, according to a new white paper from Chilmark Research. With an extremely challenging macro environment due to health care reform, here are 5 trends in how payers are shifting toward the digital consumers.
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Modern Healthcare
New path to Medicare cost control
Jan,25,2014
by:+Andis Robeznieks
Move over accountable care. A new contender for controlling Medicare costs has entered the arena. The Better Care, Lower Cost Act of 2014, introduced this month by Democratic and Republican sponsors in the House and Senate, offers an innovative path for the future of Medicare.
Under the bill, Medicare would cap payments for the sickest beneficiaries who enter the program, but set the cap high enough to fund teams that can focus on strategies that reduce hospital admissions and keep overall costs under the cap. It is, in essence, a shared-savings program—even though that term does not appear in the bill.
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Med City News
For hospitals, the Affordable Care Act means “right-sizing” healthcare
Jan,26,2014
by:+ Stephen T. Watson
Hospitals are on the frontline in the federal government's campaign to rein in sky-high costs while improving the quality of care under the Affordable Care Act, often coping with more requirements and less money. Federal health-care reform is encouraging reimbursement experiments aimed at replacing the traditional fee-for-service model with one that is outcome-driven.
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HealthDataManagement
New Insurance Selection Help for the Chronically Ill and Disabled
Jan,23,2014
by:+Joseph Goedert
The National Health Council, a coalition of advocacy groups serving individuals with chronic diseases and disabilities as well as their family caregivers, has launched a Web site to aid health consumers in understanding and selecting insurance coverage from health insurance exchanges.
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Friday, January 24, 2014

Featured Report: 25 Outreach Tools That Can Take Your Business To New Heights

This Week's Home/Small Business Online News

Small Business Newz
25 Outreach Tools That Can Take Your Business To New Heights
Jan,21,2014
by+Helen Nesterenko
Do you think a solid content marketing strategy exempts your brand from needing to do outreach? Sorry, but it doesn’t. Check out these 25 awesome outreach tools for your smash business strategy. We’re living in an era of content saturation. Over 2 million blog posts are published each day. Research by Technorati has found that digital influencers are quickly outpacing traditional media in terms of ability to win consumer trust. The world’s best-known bloggers have the ability to make or break their brand’s reputation with a simple Tweet to their massive audience. Perhaps most notable is the fact that blogs fall just behind retail websites in likelihood to influence purchase decisions.
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Venture Beat Mobile
65% of all email gets opened first on a mobile device — and that’s great news for marketers
Jan,22,2014
by:+J. O'Dell
While composing email on mobile phones is still a tricky mire of text prediction and flawed virtual keyboards, email reading is quickly shifting away from the desktop. According to data from the US Consumer Device Preference Report: Q4 2013 from Movable Ink, way more than half of all email — a full 65 percent — is now being accessed via mobile devices in the U.S. That’s up relatively steeply from just 61 percent for the third quarter of 2013.
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Duct Tape Marketing
Using Visual Media to Boost Your Marketing
Jan,23,2014
by:+ Clayton Wood
Visual media is emerging as a very important and powerful tool in online marketing. A survey released recently shows the presence of images as one of the deciding factors for clicking on search results. According to the survey done by Search Engine Land and SurveyMonkey, it is the fourth most important deciding factor, coming in after brand name, promos and discounts offered, and free delivery. This, along with the growing popularity of image and video-sharing social networks among users, presents a ripe opportunity for marketing in a way that entices multiple senses of your target audience.
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Mobile Marketing Watch
Infographic: Your Twitter Marketing Cheat Sheet
Jan,23,2014
by:+Michael E.
Is Twitter missing as a core component of your digital marketing strategy? For some, Twitter is critically important as a marketing tool. For others, it’s a nice but nonessential tool. Understanding which it should be for you involves first evaluating what Twitter can do for your enterprise.
To get there, one must make a comprehensive assessment of Twitter’s strengths and weaknesses. To assist in that effort, JamesTNoble has produced a new infographic that puts on the table everything you need to know about Twitter as a tool for digital marketing.
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Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Featured Report: Telemedicine Network cuts emergency transport for ill babies

This Week's Healthcare Online News

Modern Healthcare
Illinois ACO sees improvement in utilization, costs
Jan,22,2014
by+Andrew L. Wang
Illinois' largest health network and largest health insurer have shown marked reductions or slower growth in the use of services as part of their 3-year-old accountable-care organization, an encouraging sign as providers and payers try to reduce the cost of care.
Advocate Health Care and Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Illinois started their ACO, called AdvocateCare, three years ago aiming to better align financial incentives between the two mammoth organizations. The utilization trends, which Blue Cross provided to Crain's, provide a glimpse into the progress of one of the country's first and largest commercial ACOs.
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MobiHealthNews
Heritage Group, Sutter Health invest $23.6M in MDLive
Jan,22,2014
by:+Brian Dolan
Sunrise, Florida-based MDLive, which offers telehealth services including patient-to-physician remote visits via mobile devices, has raised $23.6 million in new funding led by Heritage Group with participation from Sutter Health and Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors. The company’s first strategic investor and connected care customer was Norfolk, Virginia-based healthcare system Sentara Healthcare, which invested in late 2012.
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TDN.com
Telemedicine Network cuts emergency transport for ill babies
Jan,20,2014
by:+Lyxan Toledanes
Dr. JoDee Anderson solves plenty of complicated cases involving newborn babies in a snap. She knows when an infant needs help breathing and what steps to take to get a normal heart rate. Sometimes she doesn’t even need to be in the same room. Instead, she diagnoses through video.
Using a mobile “robot,” Anderson and 11 other neonatologists at Oregon Health & Science University farm out their expert care to rural and mid-sized community hospitals on the Telemedicine Network. St. John is the first Washington hospital to join the network, which could reduce transports of critical newborns to Portland and elsewhere.
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Modern Healthcare
Hospitals, physicians face mounting policy and market pressure to disclose prices
Jan,18,2014
by:+Joe Carlson
Growing pressure by policymakers, employers, consumers and the media to publicly reveal the prices charged by healthcare providers and reimbursed by payers is forcing providers and payers to reconsider their longstanding opposition to price transparency.
Last week, the CMS announced it would start providing information under Freedom of Information Act requests on how much Medicare pays individual physicians. Employers, news organizations and watchdog groups have been seeking that information for many years. The American Medical Association immediately protested that the policy could violate the privacy rights of doctors and patients.
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Monday, January 20, 2014

Featured Report: Doctors play an important role in improving U.S. healthcare problems

This Week's Healthcare Online News

Med City News
Doctors play an important role in improving U.S. healthcare problems
Jan,19,2014
by:+John Mandrola, MD
Elisabeth Rosenthal, a reporter with the New York Times, is doing American doctors a favor. Her series, Paying Till it Hurts, is forcing us to face our role in the US healthcare problems. That’s a good thing, because, as it goes in the practice of Medicine, the first step to achieving good outcomes is identifying the problems.
Ms. Rosenthal’s most recent piece, Patients’ Costs Skyrocket; Specialists’ Incomes Soar, published today on the front page of the Sunday Times, aimed its scalpel on the lucrative specialty of Dermatology. But one mustn’t focus too much on the skin, there are ample areas of healthcare in need of debridement.
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MobiHealthNews
Welltok adds 14 through CafeWell Connect partner program
Jan,20,2014
by+Neil Versel
Welltok, the Denver-based creator of an online and mobile “social health management” platform, has introduced a partnership program to link technology with disease management and wellness programs.
The idea is to make it easier for population health managers from payers, health systems and accountable care organizations to provide services and actionable steps for program members.
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Modern Healthcare
Hospital prices grow at slowest rate since 1999
Jan,16,2014
by:+Melanie Evans
Hospital service prices in 2013 grew at the slowest rate since 1999, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Thursday. Prices increased 4.7% compared with an average of 6.2% per year during the past 15 years.
The hospital Consumer Price Index for 2013, which reflects the prices paid by commercial insurers, has declined steadily for the past four years. Its growth nonetheless easily outpaced the rate of overall inflation, as reflected by the consumer price index for all goods, which rose 1.5% last year.
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Med City News
How to Use Twitter for Healthcare Effectively (4 Tips)
Jan,17,2014
by:+Jonathan Govette
With Twitter going public this year, it has over 100 million daily active users and 231.7 million monthly active users worldwide to date. There are lots of opportunities for conversation on the platform about almost every topic known to man, but where does healthcare fit in on Twitter as an industry?
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