The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) filed a proposed rule last week addressing changes to the Medicare Part B physician payment fee schedule for calendar year 2011, including the integration of Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI) and the EMR incentive program.

Approximately 470,000 insurance applicants are being notified in multiple states by Anthem Blue Cross after recently learning that persons of interest manipulated the payors Individual Application Tracker web portal, which allows people applying for insurance to track the status of their insurance applications.

Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have entered into a strategic alliance designed to promote various collaborative research projects and develop new technologies.

Despite having the most costly health system in the world, the U.S. consistently lags on most dimensions of performance relative to other countries, according to new research from the Commonwealth Fund. Compared with Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the U.K., the U.S. ranks last overall.

U.S. hospitals provide economic stability and even growth during times of recession, employing more than 5.3 million people in 2008, according to a recent report from the American Hospital Association (AHA).

3M Health Information Systems has introduced ICD-10 consulting services combined with ICD-10 software to help hospitals prepare for a transition to the new coding standard, scheduled to be implemented in 2013 across the U.S.

MAP, a strategy developed by the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) to increase the efficiency of a hospital's revenue cycle, was released this week.

Some five dozen health information exchange (HIE) initiatives have cropped up across the nation enabling clinicians to share critical patient information with other caregivers in a timely fashion to allow swift, more-informed care. Currently, the sharing of medical images and radiology reports is very limited through HIEs, but forward-thinking clinicians and IT leaders are working to make seamless image sharing a radiological reality.