Focus on Reducing the Cost of Care

Reducing the cost of care requires aligning incentives of providers, payers and patients

Congress, government agencies, presidential candidates, consumers and the industry itself talk about the need to lower healthcare costs, but what does this entail? Many want to target drug costs and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has mandated hospitals to post a list of their standard charges by diagnostic-related group, in an effort for consumers to have transparent cost options. And providers need to collect every penny owed them and combat revenue leakage. This month, Healthcare IT News, MobiHealthNews and Healthcare Finance News take a look at what all of this means and how technology, as always, is spurring innovative solutions.

-- Susan Morse, senior editor, Healthcare Finance News

What you need to know

Employees
News
The insurance industry will remain but the traditional PPO is beginning to come to an end as costs...
By Susan Morse |
CT scan
News
Discussing benefits and risks of low-value diagnostic testing via head CT scan with patients can...
By Jeff Lagasse |
Cartoon hand erasing a dollar bill.
News
Wasteful spending is an increasingly thorny problem in healthcare, especially with the industry...
By Jeff Lagasse |
Doctors talking with management
News
Mergers and acquisitions helped grow revenue but it's taking health systems longer to realize...
By Max Sullivan |
LCMC Health uses pop health tech to attack value-based care head on
News
Among other successes, the health system surpassed its first-year revenue goals ($3.6 million...
By Bill Siwicki |
News
As the most recent health IT vendor to partner with a rideshare company, Cerner will embed access...
By Mike Miliard |
News
Longtime telemedicine pioneers from the provider and vendor sides see a near-term future of more...
By Mike Miliard |
News
eHI's collaborative includes Humana, United HealthCare, American Hospital Association and...
By Mike Miliard |
Graph on computer screen.
News
Despite this cost increase, 95% of employers are very confident their organization will continue to...
By Jeff Lagasse |
Hospital replaces manual Rx process with e-filling, achieves error rate of just .006%
News
LIFE St. Mary hospital uses Tabula Rasa HealthCare’s pharmacy platform, which has helped lead...
By Bill Siwicki |
News
The agency worked for two years with the certification company on a cooperative research project...
By Benjamin Harris |
prescription bottles
News
The FDA is also approving greater numbers of complex generic drugs, which are more difficult to...
By Jeff Lagasse |
News
A tiny fraction of healthcare executives, 5%, said clinical integration is their supply chain't...
By Jeff Lagasse |
News
On average, physician-led ACOs produced almost 7 times the amount of Medicare savings per...
By Jeff Lagasse |
News
In the age of consumerism, virtual visits meet consumers where they are, says Anthem executive.
By Susan Morse |
Pharmacist filling medications
News
The anticipated savings would increase in a scenario in which biosimilars made up a larger portion...
By Jeff Lagasse |
Irritated couple looking at cellphone.
News
Younger consumers are especially are willing to switch providers over a bad billing experience.
By Max Sullivan |
For one clinic, referral authorization tech cuts process from 5 minutes to 25 seconds
News
Automation changed the payer administrative tasks landscape at Primary Care Offices. For example,...
By Bill Siwicki |
Person putting out cigarette.
News
Smoking cessation efforts could ultimately be a strong investment that allows the hospital to...
By Jeff Lagasse |
UnitedHealthcare app gives members on-demand access to telehealth services
News
The app also allows users to manage prescriptions, see information on deductibles and out-of-pocket...
By Max Sullivan |
Patient in hospital bed
News
UCLA researchers have found that pressure ulcers first form on the inside of the body at a cellular...
By Susan Morse |
News
Administrative process improvements top the list of investment priorities, led by technologies to...
By Nathan Eddy |
News
Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld explores the practical implications of artificial intelligence and its impacts...
By Mike Miliard |
Doctors looking at clipboard.
News
Example of change is allowing a hospital to donate free cybersecurity software to each physician...
By Susan Morse |
Man and woman in workout class
News
Members are given financial and other rewards for participating.
By Susan Morse |
Atrium Health merges SDOH data into its Cerner EHR to improve care, trim costs
News
The North Carolina health system expects to see a decrease in emergency department utilization and...
By Bill Siwicki |
Sad doctor
News
Administrative complexity accounted for the most waste, estimated at $256.6 billion, and pricing...
By Jeff Lagasse |
News
The new offering, which includes patient matching, aggregation, normalization, deduplication and...
By Mike Miliard |
News
The integration between Cerner's HealtheIntent and i2i’s analytics products will offer...
By Nathan Eddy |
ICU doctor
News
While there's no universal standard for what constitutes a preventable ICU admission, those...
By Jeff Lagasse |
News
The company, founded by former National Coordinator for Health IT Dr. Farzad Mostashari, says...
By Nathan Eddy |
News
As politicians and their constituents grapple over Medicare for All, these well-funded startups...
By Dave Muoio |
Medical bill.
News
Making the process more palatable for consumers can help to avoid revenue leakage and lawsuits.
By Jeff Lagasse |
Money stacks
News
Optum Ventures and Premera Blue Cross led the Series B round.
By Dave Muoio |
News
The Omnibus Burden Reduction and Discharge Planning rules both aim to reduce red tape and enable...
By Mike Miliard |
The new platform applies natural language understanding technology to help health systems tackle their clinical documentation improvement initiatives.
News
For their first new post-acquisition technology, 3M Health Information Systems and M*Modal have...
By Mike Miliard |
News
Dr. Albert Chan, chief of digital patient experience at Sutter Health, says health systems have to...
By Mike Miliard |
News
A new report from Manatt Health Strategies points to big differences in how return on investment...
By Mike Miliard |
How merging financial and clinical data saved Yale New Haven Health $150 million
News
The massive undertaking, based around a new cost accounting system, is all part of a strategy to...
By Bill Siwicki |
How asynchronous telemedicine saved SSM Health 18 minutes per visit
News
The health system is averaging 600 virtual visits per month with its new telehealth offering,...
By Bill Siwicki |
How mobile RFID communications and OR workflow tech saved one hospital $1M annually
News
At Adventist Health White Memorial, reducing OR turnaround time by just three minutes may seem...
By Bill Siwicki |
How University of Rochester uses AI to reduce risk of failed follow-up
News
The University of Rochester Medical Center uses analytics with natural language processing to...
By Bill Siwicki |
Cerner, partners with Simplee on price transparency
News
Cerner will add Simplee's financial engagement platform to its revenue cycle portfolio and...
By Nathan Eddy |
News
Physician compensation rebounded from a stagnant 2017, but the increase in productivity was...
By Jeff Lagasse |

Related videos on HIMSS TV

Video
Mark Jackson of precision medicine company NantHealth was at Health 2.0 looking for new...
By HIMSS TV |
Video
There are ways patients and providers can more effectively navigate the complexity of healthcare...
By HIMSS TV |
Video
Leonard D'Avolio, founder and CEO of Cyft, says machine learning is only a means to an end,...
By HIMSS TV |
Video
This is the year that health tech ideas are coalescing toward a real sea change, says Dr. Charles...
By HIMSS TV |