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Exclusive: Apple prepares Healthkit rollout amid tangled regulatory web

BY Christina Farr, for Reuters.com (Reuters) – Apple Inc has been discussing how its “HealthKit” service will work with health providers at Mount Sinai, the Cleveland Clinic and Johns Hopkins as well as with Allscripts, a competitor to electronic health records provider Epic Systems, people familiar with the discussions said. While the talks may not…

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Small hospitals may lose billions by missing EHR deadline

By Dan Cook for benefitspro A large-scale review of data related to hospital compliance with federal electronic health records mandates reveals that most U.S. hospitals have made substantial progress toward EHR adoption. Nonetheless, because considerable federal dollars are tied to complete adoption, many hospitals — especially small rural ones — could forfeit millions as key…

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Hospitals Are Mining Patients’ Credit Card Data to Predict Who Will Get Sick

By Shannon Pettypiece and Jordan Robertson for BloombergBusinessweek Imagine getting a call from your doctor if you let your gym membership lapse, make a habit of buying candy bars at the checkout counter, or begin shopping at plus-size clothing stores. For patients of Carolinas HealthCare System, which operates the largest group of medical centers in…

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Best Hospitals 2014-15: Overview and Honor Roll

By Kimberly Leonard for usnews.com Some hospitals are more expert than others in caring for patients with life-threatening or rare conditions. And people facing such health challenges need every bit of help they can get. That’s why U.S. News & World Report has published annual rankings of the nation’s Best Hospitals for the last quarter-century.…

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Is Upcoding a Problem? Not Quite Say Researchers

By Gabriel Perna for healthcare-informatics.com Last December, the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) painted an ugly picture of fraudulent use of electronic health records (EHRs) by hospitals and healthcare provider settings. HHS OIG said that a good chunk of provider organizations they studied were not protecting patient data from potential misuse…

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Little-known Medicare lawsuit can help clear path to recovery

Medicare patients can’t lose treatment even if they ‘show no improvement,’ says oft-ignored Jimmo v. Sebelius By Gabe Quintanilla for the Houston Chronicle Several days after Christmas last year, my 91-year-old mother suffered a stroke. Up until that time, I had paid very little attention to the topic of Medicare. But in the days that…

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More than 750 hospitals face Medicare penalties for patient injuries

By Jordan Rau for Healthcare Finance News Publicly owned hospitals and those that treat large portions of low-income patients are more likely to be assessed penalties During a hernia operation, Dorothea Handron’s surgeon unknowingly pierced her bowel. It took five days for doctors to determine she had an infection. By the time they operated on…

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9 Of 10 Hospitals Plan Expanded Speech Recognition Programs

By Katie Wike, contributing writer Health IT Outcomes A KLAS survey reveals 9 of 10 hospitals plan to expand the use of front-end speech deployment. Speech recognition technology has been called an “aggressively” growing market by HIMSS, and already has shown a growth rate of more than 20 percent per year, as Health IT Outcomes…

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