Hospital administrators, emergency physicians, nurse managers and infection control practitioners increasingly view infection control and surveillance software systems as “must-haves” for 2015, according to a recent report from Black Book Rankings.

IRVING, Texas, Sept. 3, 2014-- Lightbeam Health Solutions, LLC today announced it has joined the Greenway Health online Marketplace of value-added partners for users of Greenway's integrated Electronic Health Record (EHR) and practice management solutions.

As issues continue with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) system for collecting data on industry payments to physicians and making a physician-verified version of that data available to the public by September 30, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) industry group says don’t blame industry for data problems.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is planning three weeks of ICD-10 acknowledgment testing for covered providers.

It’s official, on September 1, Northwestern Memorial HealthCare, one of Chicago’s leading academic medical center-focused healthcare systems and Cadence Health, operator of two community hospitals and numerous outpatient centers west of the city, become one.

Putting hospital staff seeking to file an appeal request on hold for six hours, no secure way to file documentation electronically, lost paperwork, taking 10 days to issue a discharge appeal decision and other serious customer service issues have led the American Hospital Association (AHA) and the Federation of American Hospitals (FAH) to conclude that the transition to the new national Quality Improvement Organization (QIO) program contractors for Beneficiary and Family Centered Care is “not working as it should.”

Earlier this year, the American Hospital Association (AHA) and three hospital and healthcare systems sued the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) over the long backlog in Medicare claim denial appeals. Now patients are joining in with a nationwide class action suit.

In an update to its April forecast, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said it now expects Medicare spending to be $49 billion less from 2015 to 2024 than it expected it to be back in April. It also predicted Medicaid spending would be $40 billion less than it thought it would be in its earlier report.