Healthcare spending in the U.S. increased 5.3 percent in 2014 to $3 trillion or $9,523 per person, while 17.5 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) was devoted to healthcare spending last year.

HIMSS has launched the HIMSS Value Score, an international quality measurement for the value of health IT.  

UnitedHealth Group CEO Stephen Hemsley said the health insurer might not offer plans on exchanges created as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Reuters reports. UnitedHealth announced in November that it had suffered significant losses on the exchanges.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has introduced a national database for hospital readmissions. 

Nearly one-quarter of the $2 trillion in mergers and acquisitions in the U.S. this year have involved healthcare companies, the Associated Press reports. The total value of healthcare deals have more than tripled in the past five years.

BOSTON—Analysis of outside information helped a hospital determine what was causing changes in its patient census. 

BOSTON--“Payer contracts are not aligned with evidence-based recommendations, said Adrian Zai, MD, PhD, MPH, clinical director of population informatics at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), speaking at the Big Data & Healthcare Analytics Forum.

The Department of Veterans Affairs paid more than $142 million in performance-based bonuses to employees in 2014, USA Today reports. The newspaper's analysis found 156,000 executives, managers and employees received bonuses.