The $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill released on March 21 includes boosts in funding for HHS, the National Institutes of Health and efforts to fight opioid abuse. What was left out were measures aimed at stabilizing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) exchanges with funding for additional reinsurance and restoring the law’s cost-sharing reduction subsidies.

Robert Redfield, MD, has been named the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But before his appointment, a top Senate Democrat said complaints about his past work as an HIV/AIDS researcher would make him an unsuitable public health leader.

Wolters Kluwer Health acquired Firecracker, an adaptive learning and study-planning application used by 20 percent of medical students, following a March 5 announcement of a signed agreement.

The University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC) in Baltimore has been cited for several violations on patient rights and hospital regulations after leaving a patient wearing only a hospital gown at a bus stop in January.

The global budgeting, all-payer program adopted for most of Maryland’s hospitals has succeeded in keeping the growth in hospital revenue and Medicare expenditures below the rest of the nation through its first three years, while also reducing readmissions and complications.

Christopher Dawes, MBA, announced he’ll be retiring as president and CEO of both Stanford Children’s Health and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford in Palo Alto, California, saying health concerns led him to leave the post immediately.

Limiting medical residents to 16-hour work shifts, instead of allowing for longer stretches, increased satisfaction with training but did not affect overall educational outcomes. Findings were published March 20 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Of the nine categories included in the 2019 Best Medical Schools rankings released by U.S. News and World Report, Harvard University either tied or placed alone at No. 1 in eight of them—the sole exception being the primary care category.