Press Release

Insurance giant Aetna is now requiring physician practices with in-office pathology labs to be both CLIA certified and accredited by either the College of American Pathologists (CAP) or the Joint Commission (JCAHO) in order to receive payments from the company for anatomic pathology services. Aetna has 18.5 million health plan members making it the third-largest health insurance company in the United States after UnitedHealth and Wellpoint.

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Hospital Impact

By Anthony Cirillo

There is a high likelihood that hospital utilization will decline precipitously over the next five to 10 years. And because of that, as a recent presentation at The Governance Institute noted, “it is now a ‘cost game’ and a ‘care organization game (for hospitals).’”

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Healthcare IT News

Bernie Monegain, Editor

NEW YORK – Led by tissue tests to aid drug therapy decisions, the personalized medicine testing market exceeded $28 billion in 2011, according to Kalorama Information. The healthcare market research publisher includes in its analysis all tests that are used to determine the appropriate therapeutic on an individual patient.

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PR Web

Edifecs, Inc. today released the results of a survey about the impact a postponement of the ICD-10 compliance deadline would have on a healthcare organization’s ICD-10 transition plans, budget and progress. The survey is one of the first to evaluate industry reaction to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ (HHS) announcement that it would consider delaying the ICD-10 implementation deadline for certain entities. Less than 48 hours after HHS’ announcement, the survey was conducted among more than 50 senior healthcare professionals attending the 2012 ICD-10 Summit, a conference hosted by Edifecs, a leading provider of healthcare software solutions. Among the findings are indications that nearly two-thirds of respondents (64 percent) believe a delay will not improve readiness, 76 percent believe a delay will harm other healthcare reform efforts, and 69 percent say a two-year delay would be either “potentially catastrophic” or “unrecoverable.”

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Healthcare Technology Online

By Ken Congdon, editor in chief

Most analyst forecasts are calling for unprecedented growth in the use of mobile technologies in the healthcare industry in 2012, and there’s plenty of data to support this prediction. For example:

• 80% of doctors in the U.S. use smartphones and medical apps in some capacity in their daily practice of medicine.
• According to a CompTIA study, nearly one-third of healthcare providers use mobile devices (tablet computers, laptops, smartphones, etc.) to access EMR/EHR systems.

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The Boston Globe

By Chelsea Conaboy, Globe Staff

Massachusetts is set once again to become a testing ground for a major federal effort to overhaul the health care industry.

Five of the 32 hospital systems and physician groups that will become “pioneers” in a program to change how doctors are paid for the care they provide Medicare patients are from eastern Massachusetts. Starting Jan. 1, the federal program will give them a budget to care for their more than 150,000 patients, rather than a payment for each test or treatment.

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AAPC

The 2011 Clinical Lab Fee Schedule annual update has been released. The update, effective Jan. 1, 2011, includes 16 new codes and 1,188 modified codes. Under the new fee schedule, local clinical laboratory rates are reduced by 1.75 percent while payments for reasonable charges for all other lab services goes up 1.1 percent.

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CAP

By Anne Paxton

The CAP will offer in 2012 five new expanded exercises in general chemistry, endocrinology, hematology, and transfusion medicine, with the aim of helping clinical laboratories meet the demands of ever more complex testing. The exercises are not proficiency testing products, and they will be completely voluntary and ungraded. But the CAP believes they will enhance the effectiveness of labs in new ways.

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