Employers this year increasingly shifted the cost of health coverage to their workers, even as total premiums rose only slightly, according to a new report by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
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About 3.4 million workers are employed by roughly 1 million small businesses that are likely to take advantage of a new healthcare premium tax credit by 2013, according to a report by the Commonwealth Fund.
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The American Medical Informatics Association, a trade group representing healthcare-informatics professionals, has created an organization to serve as an international training ground, resource center and facilitator of informatics use in low-resource regions.
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California lawmakers have passed a bill that provides more transparency on healthcare premium rate changes, while rejecting another bill that would have given state regulators the authority to halt rate increases outright.
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Technology services company CSC has named Edward Meagher senior executive adviser and vice president of its North American public-sector civil and health services group. In his new role with the Falls Church, Va.-based company, Meagher will be charged with overseeing efforts to work with government health services entities such as the Veterans Affairs Department.
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Policymakers charged with disseminating comparative-effectiveness research will need to proceed carefully and strategically to overcome obstacles such as a lack of standardized methodology and public perceptions of CER.Those were among the findings of a recently released issue brief from the New England Healthcare Institute, a not-for-profit health policy research organization based in Cambridge, Mass. The brief's authors recommended several strategies for effective CER dissemination, including the integration of CER into the current push for expanded use of health information technology.
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Eastern Long Island Hospital became the latest medical facility to connect to an online data sharing network of regional hospitals, nursing facilities and physician's offices. Known as the e-Health Network of Long Island, the online database provides electronic health records to different physicians that a patient may see in an effort to improve the quality of healthcare.Read more (registration may be required).
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Availity, a Jacksonville, Fla.,-based claims clearinghouse for physician office practices and other providers as well as Web-based portals and other services to health plans, has acquired RealMed, Indianapolis, also a provider of claims-clearinghouse and revenue-cycle management services, the companies have announced (PDF).
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Cincinnati and Detroit are the final two pilot communities selected under the new Beacon Community Cooperative Agreement Program, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced Thursday.
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Boston GlobeThe Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office said that a personal relationship between Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and a female employee “clearly endangered the reputation of the institution and its management,” and it found that “his continued, repeated and acknowledged failure to appreciate and address the situation merited, if not compelled, disciplinary action” by the hospital’s board.
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