Laura Joszt, MA

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.

On the heels of a major Republican victory in the midterm elections, the Supreme Court has decided to review the latest challenge to the Affordable Care Act.

Despite numerous delays and the difficulty of preparing for ICD-10, there are reasons to be optimistic for the transition, according to the results of a new survey.

Recently released numbers from the CMS Meaningful Use program were lower than expected, which further highlights the changes that need to be made in meeting federal guidelines for electronic health record requirements, according to officials 4 healthcare organizations.

Healthcare reform initiatives may be on shaky ground after Republicans won important seats this midterm election, but health reform advocates are claiming victory in California after defeating an insurance rate initiative.

Large employer health plans will now be required to cover in-patient hospitalization services, according to a notice from the Treasury Department and HHS on Tuesday morning. The final regulation will be issued next year.

Using global budgets for healthcare instead of traditional fee-for-service improves quality of patient care and lowers costs, according to a new study by researchers from Harvard Medical School's Department of Health Care Policy.

Patient satisfaction may be increasingly important in healthcare, but the industry hasn't made the appropriate changes yet, 2 employees from Prime Therapeutics said in back-to-back sessions at the 64th Annual Roy A. Bowers Pharmaceutical Conference.

At this time, the Supreme Court of the United States has declined to hear an appeal of one of the cases challenging the legality of making subsidies under the Affordable Care Act available to consumers on the federally run health insurance exchanges.

The Affordable Care Act expanded healthcare coverage to many low-income Americans, but this same demographic has a low health literacy that makes it difficult for them to navigate program eligibility systems, according to a study from The Urban Institute.