Accountable Care Organizations: wave of the future or blast from the past?
Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) are generating quite a buzz these days. Health policy experts rejoiced to see ACOs included in…
Patricia King, JD
EHR risk management
One of the policies underlying the government's push to encourage adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) is the expectation that…
Shared savings program
Section 3022 of PPACA calls for the establishment of a Medicare shared savings program by January 1, 2012. The shared…
Value based purchasing
Title III, Subtitle A, Part I of PPACA is entitled “Linking Payment to Quality Outcomes under the Medicare Program”. These…
Turning the Battleship: Can PPACA Change the Trajectory of Medicare Costs?
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act [i] (PPACA), commonly known as the health care reform law, will likely have…
Licensure and regulation for telemedicine
Telemedicine, by definition, is medicine at a distance. This raises new issues for physicians and practitioners since licensing is done…
Telemedicine reimbursement
Currently, Medicare pays for telemedicine only in limited areas: the originating site must be located in a rural health professional…
The basics of telemedicine
Health reform initiatives at the federal and state level have drawn attention to the challenges our country faces in making…
New law requires greater healthcare privacy protections
Privacy advocates worry that as patient records move from paper to the digital environment, security breaches will occur more frequently…
Evolving standards for personal health records
As the healthcare industry continues its progress toward adoption of electronic health records, another type of electronic record garnered big…