House Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore) re-introduced his bipartisan Medicare Transitional Care Act in the 113th Congress on Thursday. The bill seeks to create a new benefit to support and coordinate care for Medicare beneficiaries as they move from the hospital setting to their homes or other care setting.

It’s been used in other industries for years, and now healthcare is using data mining to identify high-cost patients with similar characteristics, improve quality and manage costs. Growing efforts to dig into big data are yielding more insight into one of the most challenging and complex diseases: cancer.

After three years of defending the Ashland, Kentucky, hospital against the government’s allegations that it had submitted Medicare and Kentucky Medicaid claims for medically unnecessary cardiology procedures and paid cardiologists kickbacks to perform more procedures at King’s Daughters Medical Center, the hospital negotiated a $40.9 million settlement — roughly double the amount of the alleged false claims.

Dashboards are emerging as valuable tools for tracking performance measures and other efforts related to quality of care. 

Ambulatory surgery center operator Amsurg Corp., Nashville, Tennessee, is making a big play to expand into the fast-growing physician outsourcing market with its purchase of Sheridan Healthcare based in Sunrise, Florida.

Physicians and teaching hospitals that want the chance to review information about payments or other transfers of value they’ve received from pharmaceutical, medical device and other industry groups before this information is made public should register with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) starting Sunday, June 1, 2014.

Rudolph Contreras, judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, has ruled the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services acted outside of its regulatory authority when it interpreted the law covering payments for pharmaceuticals with “orphan drug” status as not applying to payments when the drug was prescribed for a condition for which it was not an “orphan drug,” such as Prozac prescribed for depression (its most common use) instead of either of Prozac’s two orphan indications.

Last year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) made Medicare hospital payment data public, followed this year by individual physician payment data. Now journalists want data on the private Medicare Advantage plans and have filed suit to get it.