William Rogers, MD, director of the Physicians Regulatory Issues Team at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, has been named ICD-10 ombudsman.

With just over a month to go until the Oct. 1 ICD-10 deadline, the American Hospital Association has released a checklist of key steps that hospitals should take to ensure a successful transition.

Medicare has long required a three-day hospital stay before it will pick up the tab for a senior to move into a skilled nursing facility. A new data crunch shows that waiving this prerequisite shortens costly and risky hospital stays—without driving up admissions to skilled nursing facilities or lengthening stays therein.

The American Hospital Association is urging the U.S. Department of Justice to take a hard look at Anthem’s planned $48.4 billion purchase of Cigna.

Researchers are as subject to human nature as anyone else and so may be inclined to only publish, or at least to slant study design and conclusions toward, positive results of clinical trials. 

 Xerox’s (NYSE: XRX) Health Enterprise platform, a next-generation Medicaid Management Information System (MMIS), has received full federal certification in New Hampshire. 

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah—June 3, 2015—To help hospital organizations and physician practices convert systems, reports and records into the language of ICD-10, 3M has released a new version of the 3M ICD-10 Code Translation Tool, which has been expanded to include Current Procedural Terminology (CPT®) and other HCPCS codes.

The U.S. House of Representatives may vote next week to permanently change the made Medicare pays hospitals and physicians, The Hill reports.