Beginning in 2010, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will ban a pricing technique that lowered costs for health insurers and drug-benefits managers while pushing elderly beneficiaries over their coverage limits for prescriptions. For beneficiaries with high overall drug expenditures, the change will slow their movement toward the initial coverage limit.

U.S. healthcare spending grew 6.1 percent in 2007 to $2.2 trillion, or $7,421 per person, which was the slowest rate of growth since 1998, and 0.6 of a percentage point lower than the growth of 6.7 percent in 2006, according to a report by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

As Congress drafts an economic stimulus package, U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., proposed that federal funding be distributed to states for healthcare IT initiatives in a letter to President-elect Barack Obama.

The Commonwealth Fund has launched a new web resource at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement's National Forum, in Nashville, La., which will make public the competing hospital quality ratings systems.

GE Healthcare IT has launched an initiative to simplify physician participation in Medicares Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI) and released its Centricity Business version 4.3.

In regions of the U.S. where cardiologists perform high numbers of cardiac catheterizations to diagnose heart problems, patients may be receiving PCI more than they need or want, according to a study published in the December 16/23 issue of Circulation.

Before economic turmoil hit, hospitals had shown important progress in healthcare IT adoption, and for now, many of the initiatives are funded and moving forward, according to an online survey published by the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), the National Alliance for Health IT (NAHIT) and the American Hospital Association (AHA) Solutions.

The health industry will face a plethora of challenges in 2009, including how to deal with more underinsured, adapt to new coding methods and fund new cures in a capital-starved market, according to an annual report from the Health Research Institute at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).