Roberta Schwartz, Houston Methodist’s chief innovation officer, has had years of experience overseeing technology adoption at her organization. At a conference, she highlighted how important it is for digital health tools to have strong EHR integrations and encouraged hospital leaders to not be afraid of starting various technology initiatives in unrelated areas.

This year, HCA Healthcare and Google Cloud have expanded their partnership by exploring ways to integrate Google’s generative AI into HCA’s workflows. The most developed project under this initiative is a pilot that began in February in which HCA’s emergency department physicians are testing a voice-enabled medical dictation tool to save them time on clinical documentation.

CMS has fined two hospitals in September for alleged violations of its price transparency rule. This marks the third month in a row that the agency has issued fines against hospitals for price transparency noncompliance, following a yearslong period of light enforcement.

The federal government has warned hospitals that using third-party analytics tools on their websites could violate HIPAA, and more than 20 hospitals are facing class-action lawsuits over the use of these tools. But a recent analysis found that hospitals are doing a poor job of fixing their websites and preventing patient data collection.

Only actual hospital prices, displayed as dollars and cents, not estimates, formulas, or algorithms, protect patients from outrageous bills and hold hospitals accountable for overcharges, errors, and fraud. Accepting CMS’ or other substitutes instead of actual prices undermines broader efforts to make hospital price transparency a reality for American patients and healthcare consumers.

This week, senators introduced a bipartisan bill that would make it a federal crime to assault hospital workers. Even though nearly 40 states have passed laws to intensify penalties for violent acts committed against healthcare personnel, there is currently no federal law protecting hospital employees from assault or intimidation. 

A webinar sponsored by AVIA Health and SeamlessMD will discuss the latest trends in remote monitoring and how to extend these benefits beyond chronic conditions all while using fewer staff resources.

During past recessions, the healthcare sector remained relatively immune to economic downswings — but things are different now that a sweeping labor shortage and lower patient volumes have been added to the mix.

California passed a law last year aimed at controlling rising healthcare costs that gave the state the ability to scrutinize healthcare deals of a certain size involving California companies. What impact can it have?

Team-based primary care is needed now more than ever as our “on-demand” and mobile lives, complicated by a primary care shortage crisis, have led to a more transactional and fragmented healthcare experience.

Even with my “VIP” access to the healthcare system as a physician who practiced in my community, I’m still struggling to coordinate my care as a cancer patient. I believe patients need more from their payers, providers, and digital health collaborators when it comes to care coordination and navigation.

Next year REACH ACOs will have to show success in developing and maintaining comprehensive health equity plans, and by kicking the can down the road they risk not knowing enough about their patient population in terms of what works better and what doesn’t. ACOs can pay in the effort of continuous iteration now or they can pay in poor health outcomes for their patients and the resulting increased costs. The choice is theirs, but one they each have to make.

The Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions announced that it will soon begin conducting strike authorization votes among its 85,000 members. The coalition’s chief concern is Kaiser’s dangerous staffing levels, which members say have led to excessively long wait times, patient neglect and mistaken diagnosis. If the coalition authorizes and implements the strike, it will become the largest strike of healthcare workers in the history of the U.S.

A micro-credential/apprenticeship program can be a game changer for health-care organizations and employees alike. Health-care organizations, by putting non-traditional candidates on the payroll, are getting help faster and investing in the future.

A recent survey on nurses’ mental health offers some reasons for cautious optimism. The survey showed that nurses’ mental health has continued to improve since its bleakest days during the peak of the pandemic. However, most nurses said they remain unhappy with their employer’s efforts to prioritize their mental wellbeing.

The second quarter of 2023 ended with 309 active drug shortages, the highest total in nearly a decade, according to a new report from ASHP. One of the organization’s executives pointed out that drug shortages have two major impacts on health systems: they create a lot of extra work for the pharmacy department, and they force clinicians to make tough decisions about patient care that could potentially result in worse patient outcomes.

Santa Clara Valley Healthcare in California has begun notifying 43,000 patients about their eligibility for billing corrections and refunds. The system’s patient outreach effort is a result of a recently settled lawsuit filed against Santa Clara County. In the complaint, former patients alleged the county did not inform them about its hospitals’ charity care and discount payment policies, leading them to have to pay large bills.

CMS recently announced that it will change the administrative fee that providers and insurers must pay when initiating a reimbursement dispute under the No Surprises Act — the agency is lowering the fee from $350 to $50. This move came a week after the Texas Medical Association won a court case challenging HHS over its 600% price hike on the fee.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center is under federal investigation after it turned transgender patients’ medical records over to Tennessee’s attorney general. HHS launched the investigation a couple weeks after two VUMC patients filed a class-action lawsuit against the hospital for releasing their records to the attorney general.

A new Accenture report laid out considerations that hospitals should keep in mind as they adopt new technology aimed at improving nurse retention. Some of the report’s key recommendations for providers were to build a strong, cloud-based technology infrastructure and to involve nurses early on in the process of adopting a new digital tool.

Senator Mark Warner (D-Virginia) penned a letter to Google leadership expressing concerns about Med-PaLM 2 — the company’s generative AI tool for healthcare providers that is currently being used by Mayo Clinic and other health systems. The letter requested that Google provide more clarity about its chatbot’s training, accuracy, ethical considerations and deployment in healthcare settings.

HCA and Tenet reported net incomes for the second quarter, while CHS posted a net loss. All three health systems found themselves in a better financial position in Q2 2023 than they were in Q2 of last year, driven in large part by declining contract labor expenses.

Hospitals and outpatient treatment centers in at least three states are struggling to get their systems back online following a ransomware attack waged last week against parent company Prospect Medical Holdings. Some of these facilities have partially or completely halted patient care.

Hospitals’ pharmacy spending is projected to rise by 3.42% next year, according to a new report. Specialty drugs, including Ozempic and Humira, as well as neurology medications are the primary drivers of this increase in pharmacy expenses.

Geisinger is launching a pilot program in partnership with virtual heart failure monitoring startup Bodyport. About 200 of the health system’s heart failure patients will be using Bodyport’s cardiac scale at home — the scale uses sensors to measure a person’s metrics of heart function and body fluid status after they stand on it for about 20 seconds.

Chicago-based Rush University System for Health recently struck a partnership with Cadence — the health system is beginning an RPM pilot using the startup’s technology platform and clinicians. Rush will enroll Medicare and Medicaid patients who have one or more of the following chronic conditions: hypertension, congestive heart failure and type 2 diabetes.

Last week, the CFO of Universal Health Services stated that the company chooses which patients to treat based on whose insurance plans offer the highest payments. The comments have sparked some media attention, but healthcare finance experts say the practice of cherry-picking patients is nothing new to the industry.

It’s never a question of whether a hospital will experience downtime — it’s a matter of when. Adopting the right downtime technology means hospitals can cut costs, reduce stress on staff and mitigate risk of cyberattack by automatically encrypting data to HIPAA standards.

Executives from Geisinger and UNC Health discussed the most impactful ways they have deployed predictive AI across their health systems during a recent virtual panel. At Geisinger, these predictive algorithms are reducing avoidable emergency department admissions, and at UNC, they are helping to identify sepsis before it becomes severe.

NorthShore University HealthSystem teamed up with Laguna Health in 2021 to study whether greater post-acute care support can improve patient recovery and reduce readmissions. The research partners recently released results of the study, which found that giving patients emotional and psychological support after their discharge hastens recovery, decreases costs and alleviates physician burnout.