Northside Hospital and Gwinnett Medical Center, two large hospitals serving metro Atlanta, Ga., are discussing the possibility of combining their operations. 

From 2009 to 2012, Medicare spending grew at an annual rate of 1.1 percent, a decline from the previous five years when Medicare spending increased at an average annual rate of 5.1 percent. Researchers from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management found 14 percent of the share of the decline in spending growth was due to lingering effects of the U.S. economic recession that lasted from December 2007 to June 2009.

William Rogers, MD, director of the Physicians Regulatory Issues Team at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, has been named ICD-10 ombudsman.

Researchers from the Cincinnati Children's' Hospital Medical Center teamed up with ImproveCareNow Network to create a proof-of-concept architecture for a network-based learning health system to integrate chronic care management, quality improvement and research.

Phynd Technologies, Inc., headquartered in Kearney, NE, with executive offices in Dallas, TX, announced recently the signing of six new health systems, representing 48 hospitals and 136,000 physicians.

The pressure to deliver high-value care has led to massive growth in understanding the need for transparency, said Robert Wachter, MD, professor and interim chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, speaking at the Aug. 20 installment of the HIT Safety Webinar Series. 

Primary care physicians working in accountable care organizations (ACOs) received around half of their compensation from salary, according to an analysis of a physician practice survey administered in 2012 and 2013. Only 3.4 percent of their compensation was based on the quality of care they delivered.

Along with the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health & Science University, Intel has launched Collaborative Cancer Cloud, a service designed to enable providers and researchers to securely share genomic, imaging and clinical data among patients.