A new set of strategies was released in a report by the Commonwealth Fund Commission on a high-performance health system to help improve how the U.S. healthcare system serves the uninsured, low-income or members of racial and ethnic minority groups.

Nearly 20.5 million people with Medicare coverage reviewed their health status at a free annual wellness visit or received other preventive services with no deductible or cost sharing this year, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

At the request of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Measures Application Partnership (MAP) released its first two reports, each pointing to opportunities for more coordinated approaches to making healthcare safer and enhancing clinician performance.

Despite recent efforts to reduce readmission rates in the U.S., results from a report by the Dartmouth Atlas Project showed a large regional variation in 30-day readmission rates, particularly for Medicare beneficiaries post-acute care. The average readmission rate in the U.S. currently stand at 16.1 percent, which shows that more needs to be done to close gaps in care. To help get a handle on readmissions, providers from Spectrum Health have developed cardiac care solutions for patients to try and reduce heart failure readmissions.

A class action complaint has been filed against Stanford Hospitals and Clinics for the unlawful disclosure of confidential medication information obtained from patients on a public website.

Harris, an International communications and IT company based in Melbourne, Fla., has been awarded a $37 million contract by the National Cancer Institutes Center for Cancer Research, in which Harris will manage clinical data for the NCIs intramural clinical trials program.

The jurisdictional issues of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) are currently cloudy with a low chance of predictability in how the Supreme Court will resolve them, according to a perspective paper published Oct. 5 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

SALT LAKE CITYCarolyn M. Clancy, MD, director of Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), used a quotation from Peter Pronovost, MD, PhD, an intensive care physician from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore to lay out her keynote presentation at the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) conference: The fundamental problem with the quality of American medicine is that weve failed to view the delivery of healthcare as a science thats a mistake, a huge mistake.