Cardiovascular professionals from around the world will be in Washington, D.C., this month for the American College of Cardiology's Scientific Session and Expo -- and LUMEDX will be there as well.

The bundled-payment program for cardiac care will go forward despite the Trump administration and the confirmation of new Health & Human Services Secretary Tom  Price, a critic of the program. July 1 remains the start date for the initiative, according to an HHS official who spoke to Modern Healthcare.

If hospitals could accurately predict which patients were going to experience complications down the road, they could intervene early with those patients, and perhaps prevent them from having to be rehospitalized. Reducing readmissions is one of the potential benefits of predictive analysis, and it’s a big one.

Christiana Care Health System, one of the largest healthcare providers in the mid-Atlantic, has achieved wide-ranging improvements in both clinical performance and business outcomes after implementing strategies designed to ensure top-quality care delivery while at the same time containing costs.

Heart hospital across the country are preparing for the new mandatory bundled-payment program for cardiac care. Set to begin this July, the program makes hospitals in certain markets accountable for the quality and cost of care for bypass and heart attack patients until 90 days after discharge.

LUMEDX is happy to welcome to our family three new clients: Marshall Medical Centers; Holyoke Medical Center; and Baylor Scott & White Health, the largest not-for-profit healthcare organization in Texas.

How would you like to have to tell 34,000 patients that their data had been hacked? That’s the situation that Quest Diagnostics found itself in recently after hackers stole health information including names, birth dates, telephone numbers and lab results.

As the dust settles after the presidential election, it appears that Donald Trump is already softening some of his positions, especially his position on Obamacare. Media outlets have speculated that President Obama pushed hard for the continuance of his signature healthcare program when he met with Trump at the White House following the election.

Patient safety is once again in the news with the recent release of the Leapfrog Group's Fall 2016 Hospital Safety Grade List. Almost all the hospitals on the list received a passing grade. Of the 2,633 hospitals evaluated, 844 earned an "A," 658 earned a "B," 954 earned a "C," 157 earned a "D" and 20 earned an "F."

Last weekend was a busy one for those trying to parse the new MACRA rule released on Friday. At 2,202 pages, the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act rule wasn't exactly beach reading, and it gave the health IT community plenty to talk about on social media and in policy statements.

The dust is still settling, but it appears that early reaction to the rule was mostly positive. Healthcare organizations praised the CMS for being responsive to concerns they had raised during the comment period leading up to the rule's finalization. In fact, about 80 percent of the 2,000+ pages are comments CMS received and its responses.
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