Cadence Health and Northwestern Memorial HealthCare have signed a letter of intent to merge — a deal that could create one of the largest nonprofit academic healthcare delivery systems in the midwest.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) urgently seeks volunteers for ICD-10 end-to-end testing with Medicare in July 2014, according to a notice.

EHRs can be used effectively to predict the onset of sepsis, according to researchers from the University of California at Davis.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is looking to recoup payments after discovering that its Physician Quality Reporting System and Electronic Prescribing incentive programs are riddled with data integrity issues, such as rejected and improper payments.

The FDASIA Work Group soon will release a proposed strategy for a risk-based regulatory framework for health IT, FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, MD, told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee during a hearing that examined FDA’s initiatives and priorities.

A study of inpatient and outpatient data from 71 hospitals in seven counties covering the greater Chicago area finds that hospital systems will need to reinvent their business models if they hope to survive in a post fee-for-service world.

Hospital operators feeling the pinch from reduced inpatient volumes due to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ new regulations to better define when a short-term stay should count as an inpatient stay are certainly not alone. According to financial analysts at the prestigious Moody's Investors Service,  the new inpatient billing rule referred to as the “two-midnight rule” will put financial pressure on hospitals for some time to come.

PatientsLikeMe, an online network of patients with chronic disease, recently launched its “data for good” campaign that promotes health information sharing to advance research.