More than half of healthcare organizations are not yet ready for the Oct. 1 ICD-10 transition, according to a new survey.

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. 

Almost one-quarter of physician practices that responded to the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange's (WEDI) most recent ICD-10 readiness survey will not be ready and another one-quarter said they are unsure.

In order to bill Medicare—in fact, just to be eligible to practice medicine—a physician must hold a degree from an accredited medical school. Yet Medicare’s provider database contains the names of more than 6,000 doctors whose credentials trace to medical schools that have been out of business for decades.