Laura Joszt, MA

Although there are no current cases of Ebola in the United States, an increased number of hospitals are now equipped to treat patients with the virus while minimizing risk to healthcare workers.

Employers and employees are seeing eye-to-eye when it comes to integrated health benefits. Not only do employees see how an integrated plan can improve quality of care and health, but employers see how it makes good business sense.

Efforts to improve patient safety in hospitals are paying off: there were 1.3 million fewer adverse events harming patients in 2011, 2012, and 2013, according to a new report from HHS.

Among the dozen revisions to the Medicare Shared Savings Program being considered includes one that could bring some relief to accountable care organizations facing penalties for poor performance.

Despite a drop in the uninsured rate stemming from the Affordable Care Act, more Americans are putting off medical treatment because of the cost of healthcare, according to the results of an annual Gallup survey.

More than 1 million Americans applied for coverage through the federal Marketplace during the first week of open enrollment, HHS reported in the first of its weekly data snapshots.

Attempts to contain emerging global health threats, like the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa, are hampered by barriers to sharing public health data, according to an international team of researchers.

Medical technology hazards remain a top safety issue for hospitals and can come in many forms. However, for the fourth year in a row, alarm hazards topped the annual Top 10 Health Technology Hazards list from the ECRI Institute.

Physicians who receive higher reimbursements for routine office visits are more likely to perform cancer screening tests on Medicaid beneficiaries, according to a new study in Cancer.

Few employers are planning to eliminate their health benefits in 2015, but they are still looking to make noticeable changes, according to a report from the Employee Benefit Research Institute.

The deadline for eligible hospitals and critical access hospitals to attest to meeting meaningful use requirements has been pushed back a full month, according to CMS.

In the first 2 years of the Affordable Care Act, open enrollment has run for 2 different time periods, and HHS is looking to set a fixed date for future years. Plus, it offers a solution to automatic re-enrollment.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center have used electronic health record analysis to uncover hidden drug benefits, according to a study appearing in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

Republicans finally filed a lawsuit against President Obama's healthcare reform law, the Affordable Care Act, after approving the suit in July. They are challenging the employer-based coverage aspect of the law, as well as Treasury payments to insurers.

Clinicians are showing increased openness toward using digital technology and are becoming more comfortable with trusting tools like at-home test results, according to a new report from PwC's Health Research Institute.

An examination of nearly 200 medication adherence trials found that it is actually difficult to determine whether or not the approaches truly worked.

In an effort to foster greater transparency of healthcare costs, the government and private sector entities are offering tools that provide cost and quality information to consumers. But just how effective are these tools?

After 4 years of living with inflammatory breast cancer, Amy Berman, RN, BS, senior program officer at the John A. Hartford Foundation, she still felt fine, which she attributed to her care choices, she explained during her speech at The American Journal of Managed Care's Patient-Centered Oncology Care meeting in Baltimore, Maryland.

One-fifth of adults with health insurance spent at least 5% of their income on out-of-pocket healthcare costs over the past year with low-income adults the most likely to have high costs, according to a report from The Commonwealth Fund.

Patients taking Merck's Vytorin, which combines simvastatin with the non-statin Zetia, experienced fewer major cardiovascular events than patients treated with simvastatin alone, according to the results of the IMPROVE-IT study.

Despite challenges with reimbursement and physician buy-in, healthcare organizations are committed to implementing telemedicine programs, according to a survey of healthcare leaders, mostly C-suite executives.

As cost containment becomes increasingly important in healthcare, the findings of a recent study in the Annals of Family Medicine on the impacts of continuity of care could have an impact on how healthcare systems deliver care.

Although open enrollment for the Affordable Care Act's insurance Marketplaces is almost here, a 10-question survey from Kaiser Family Foundation found that the health law's target audience still struggles with understanding insurance coverage.

The Affordable Care Act's impact on hospital finances is of decreasing concern, although providers expect trends related to the health law to be a major challenge.

Hospice care for Medicare patients resulted in lower hospitalization rates and lower healthcare expenditures during the last year of life, according to a study published the November 12 issue of JAMA.

Traditional pay-for-performance programs tend to result in significant waste for payers, but the industry could benefit from a slightly modified model, which focus efforts on patients who are at higher risk for poor outcomes.

Open enrollment doesn't begin until Saturday, but the Obama administration is already predicting lower enrollment numbers for the second year of the health insurance exchanges, according to a memo from HHS.

As the healthcare industry transitions to new initiatives such as accountable care organizations and pay-for-performance, clinical documentation improvement is necessary, according to a report from the American Health Information Management Association.

In less than 2 months the health insurance Marketplaces will need to be financially self-sustaining, which will occur through a variety of approaches, as federal establishment funds will run out on January 1, 2015.

Based on data from 17 states and the District of Columbia, premium increases for 2015 are expected to be low, according to a report from The Urban Institute.