The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) could be flipping the script on the requirements that hospitals and critical access hospitals must meet to participate in the Medicare and Medicaid programs. The agency released a notice of proposed rulemaking stating that these proposed changes are an integral part of our efforts to reduce procedural burdens on providers.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has released a final rule to revise the ambulatory surgical centers (ASCs) conditions for coverage to allow patient rights information to be provided to the patient, the patients representative or the patients surrogate prior to the start of the surgical procedure.

The American College of Cardiology (ACC) is expanding its outpatient registry, the PINNACLE Registry, with a new platform focusing on atrial fibrillation and including the next generation of anticoagulants.

Hospitals and health systems in the U.S. are facing an unparalleled force to change, according to the inaugural report of the American Hospital Association (AHA) Committee on Performance Improvement (CPI), which offered recommendations for practice management strategies for the healthcare environment of tomorrow.

HealthStar Physicians, a multi-specialty physician group serving Eastern Tennessee, has selected three of health IT developer athenahealths cloud-based services.

The overall heart failure (HF) hospitalization rate for Medicare patients dropped nearly 30 percent between 1998 and 2008, according to a study published Oct. 19 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, but the improvement was not shared by all races or geographic regions. Overall, one-year mortality rates also dipped modestly but still remained high, suggesting that more work needs to be done to achieve better outcomes, the lead investigator told Cardiovascular Business in an interview.

Despite pockets of improvement, the U.S. healthcare system as a whole failed to improve when compared to best performers in the U.S., and among other nations, according to the third national scorecard report from the Commonwealth Fund Commission. The U.S. healthcare system scored 64 out of 100 on key measures of performance, the New York City-based nonprofit added.

3M Health Information Systems introduced the 3M 360 Encompass System, a software application that connects and automates coding, clinical documentation improvement (CDI) and performance monitoring.