The National Quality Forum’s Measure Applications Partnership (MAP) has submitted recommendations to the Department of Health and Human Services for approximately 140 performance measures under consideration for use in 16 federal healthcare programs.

Abbott has agreed to acquire point-of-care diagnostics company Alere for approximately $5.8 billion, the companies announced this week. 

INDIANAPOLIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Zotec Partners (Zotec), an industry leader in emergency medicine physician coding, billing and practice management services, is pleased to announce that it will continue its Gold level sponsorship commitment with the Emergency Department Practice Management Association (EDPMA) in 2016.

The California Department of Public Health fined the Community Regional Medical Center $86,625 after a hospital employee left a towel inside a patient following abdominal surgery, the Fresno Bee reports. This is the hospital’s fourth penalty since 2007.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released a proposed rule to update the methodology used to measure the performance of accountable care organizations (ACOs) in the Medicare Shared Savings Program.

A recent report examining employer-sponsored private insurance claims data found that basing healthcare decisions on Medicare data might not be the best practice. The researchers found that the correlation between total spending per Medicare beneficiary and total spending per privately insured beneficiary was 0.14 in 2011, while the correlation for inpatient spending was 0.267.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is proposing changes in the benchmarks it uses to evaluate ACOs in the Medicare Shared Savings Program.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Board of Directors of McKesson Corporation (NYSE:MCK) today declared a regular dividend of twenty-eight cents per share on Common Stock. The dividend will be payable on April 1, 2016, to stockholders of record on March 1, 2016.