To call the last few months a busy time for healthcare lobbyists in Washington, D.C. would be quite an understatement. Rather than dwell on the failed attempts at repealing the Affordable Care Act, the Medical Group Management Association’s (MGMA) senior vice president of government affairs, Anders Gilberg, will look ahead to more immediate regulatory concerns and longer-term hopes for “lasting reform.”

Private investors are becoming increasingly active in healthcare acquisitions, which may maximize the purchase price when practices decide to sell, but there are downsides to these transactions compared to be absorbed into a hospital or health system.

The new administration at CMS and HHS has signaled it wants to take a different path on value-based care models. Some have been clear actions, like ending mandatory bundled payment models in cardiac care. The next step may be more driven by stakeholders, as CMS recently released a request for information (RFI) asking what new models developed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) should look like.

The art of medicine and strong patient-provider relationships have been ignored in favor of the business and science sides of the profession, argues Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) President and CEO Halee Fischer-Wright, MD, MMM, in her new book “Back to Balance.”

Providing pediatric patients with a virtual reality (VR) tour of the operating room (OR) before receiving anesthesia could reduce preoperative anxiety, according to a study published in British Journal of Surgery.

A June 2016 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine that found “modest savings on average” from accountable care organizations (ACOs) has been retracted and replaced after errors were discovered in the CMS data used by researchers.

While clinicians may be confused or frustrated with the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA), professionals in health information management should see it as “nothing but positive” and embrace it, according to Bonnie Cassidy, MPA, principal of advisory services at nThrive and former president and chair of the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA).

The resignation of Tom Price, MD, as HHS Secretary, may cause a reshuffling of officials at its other agencies based on rumors of who is being considered as his replacement.