The annual ranking of U.S. hospitals by the news magazine U.S. News & World Report has long stirred controversy, particularly by the heavy weight it gives to hospital reputation as measured by the votes of just a few hundred American Medical Association member physicians. However, its influence in hospital marketing is undeniable.

A new $100 million program at the Department of Health & Human Services aims to accelerate Medicaid reform.

A final rule regarding the new ICD-10 implementation date is coming from the Centers for Medicare & Medicd Services but new guidance indicates the need for dual coding.

Breakthrough ideas exist in the minds of the people working in the trenches of healthcare every day, and healthcare system leaders need to foster an environment conducive to enabling these individuals to recognize and capture these innovations, notes Bobby Grajewski, president of Edison Nation Medical in an exclusive interview with HealthCXO.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) used the proposed 2015 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (MPFS) to create some carrots and sticks to encourage moving the care of more patients, particularly the growing percentage of beneficiaries with multiple chronic illnesses, into the lower-cost outpatient primary care setting.

As more conditions are cared for in the community setting rather than in hospitals, the jobs are moving along with the patients. The latest U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report finds hospital hiring largely flat but physician office hiring up 4,000 jobs from the previous month and up 57,200 jobs from June of last year.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has proposed a 2.1 percent market basket update for services paid under the hospital Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS) in 2015 and to update Ambulatory Surgery Center (ASC) payments by 1.2 percent next year.

Low-risk procedures performed in a hospital outpatient setting are reimbursed at a higher level than the same procedures performed in an ambulatory surgery center (ASC), but is there value in the higer payments for procedures done in hospital outpatient surgical departments? In proposed quality measure changes, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) aims to make it easier to compare quality between the two types of surgical settings.