The Supreme Court is filling its entire court calendar the week of March 26 with arguments relating to the impending review of the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA); totaling five and a half hours over three days with a decision expected in late June.

Despite federal regulations requiring hospitals participating in Medicare to develop and maintain Quality Assessment and Performance Improvement programs, hospital incident reporting systems only captured an estimated 14 percent of patient harm events experienced by Medicare beneficiaries discharged in October 2008, according to a January Office of Inspector General (OIG) report.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued an interim final rule with comment period where the agency will adopt standards for the HealthCare Electronic Funds Transfers and Remittance Advice transaction under HIPAA to mitigate administrative costs for providers.

Beginning in 2009 with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the decision to adopt ICD-10, federal efforts to encourage health IT implementation have formed a labyrinth of initiatives for health IT professionals to navigate, according to an article in the Journal of American Health Information Management Association.  

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has finalized an initial core set of 35 healthcare quality measures for Medicaid-eligible adults as required by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

In an effort to reduce healthcare costs, the U.S. has succeeded in getting the length of hospital stays for myocardial infarction (MI) down, but the tradeoff may be in higher readmission rates, according to a study that compared 30-day MI readmission rates in the U.S. and 16 other countries. The study in the Jan. 4 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association found that patients in the U.S. had the shortest median length of stay but also had a 68 percent increased risk of being readmitted within a month.

Patient-centered medical homes (PCMH), healthcare organizations that employ a coordinated delivery model designed to provide cost-effective care, are emerging as efforts to cure the fragmented nature of the healthcare system. However, there are few standards to guide evaluations of PCMHs' effectiveness, which has prompted the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to make PCMH evaluation recommendations.

Demand for oncology services is on the rise, and that has hospitals around the country looking at either adding a new or bolstering an existing oncology service line, says Timea Zsiray, oncology marketing manager for GE Healthcare (Waukesha, Wisconsin). “The Journal of Clinical Oncology projected that by 2030 there will be a 45% increase in cancer