In an email to CMS staff, agency administrator Seema Verma announced Adam Boehler, CEO of home-based care startup Landmark Health, has been named the new head of the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Innovation (CMMI).

Four of the five major health insurers in the U.S. are involved in major mergers and acquisitions discussed over the past few months. The lone exception has been Anthem, which may put the company in a stronger position, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is fighting claims from fired VA Secretary David Shulkin, MD, that the agency is moving toward privatizing veterans’ healthcare, issuing a press release calling such talk “completely false and a red herring designed to distract and avoid honest debate on the real issues."

In a freewheeling question-and-answer session at the ACHE Congress in Chicago, Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush made some bold statements about where electronic health records are heading and why virtualization should trump other healthcare priorities.

A new report from IQVIA has collected information on the largest accountable care organizations (ACOs) in the country based on the number of participating facilities, along with portions of organizational and professional rosters as well as the largest organizations in four of the ACO models offered by CMS.

Patient portals are touted as a new avenue to improve engagement. But this new method of communication may be the cause of addition stress in the patients, according to the Washington Post.

In Democrat-dominated California, an intraparty fight is brewing over how to remake the state’s healthcare system. In one corner, advocates are trying to achieve universal healthcare by expanding the Affordable Care Act’s gains in insurance coverage. In the other, there are diehard supporters of moving to a single-payer system.

In 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found 221 instances of “unusual resistance germs” which can cause infections untreatable by antibiotics and spread that resistance to other germs. This “nightmare bacteria,” as the CDC called it, means hospitals and other healthcare facilities need to take “early and aggressive” action whenever a single case is found within their walls.