Boarding is hospital-speak for when patients get left in the emergency department, typically on gurneys or in wheelchairs, for many hours—sometimes days—because no inpatient beds are available.
Prior to the new “RAPID” program announced on Thursday, it could take a year or more for Breakthrough-designated medical devices to earn approval for Medicare coverage. Now regulators say that timeline could be reduced to as little as two months.
The U.S. Department of Justice said Wisconsin-based Apple Clinic and its owner Michael Johnson, MD, were using a combination of nerve density testing, vitamin injections and electrical stimulation to alleviate pain, billing Medicare for these medically unnecessary services.
The more you maintain good physical fitness from your mid-40s to your mid-60s, the likelier you are to add years to your life and life to your later years.
Speaking at a Politico health care policy forum, CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz, MD, said he supports Medicaid, adding that “when you love something, you protect it.”
The insurance giant has been piloting a program to speed up reimbursement to hospitals in 10 states, reducing delays by roughly 50%. Now, the company said it will work to lift prior authorization barriers on patient care delivery. The intent is to roll out these changes nationwide by the end of 2026, UnitedHealthcare confirmed.
By and large, U.S. hospitals and health systems do not have an AI adoption problem. But many—if not most—have an execution problem: They struggle to turn a set of installed AI tools into a measurable operational value.
Family physicians and other primary care providers don’t mind being held to account for care quality by healthcare administrators. The rub is that multiple other stakeholders often demand similar levels of answerability, pulling the doctors in different directions at once.
