Less than a week after reports surfaced that the Justice Department was investigating UnitedHealth Group for billing practices in Medicare Advantage, a key senator is also putting pressure on the company. The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, sent a letter to UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty pushing for a detailed look at how the company handles billing in Medicare Advantage.
Electronic health record vendor Oracle Health has formally submitted its application to become a Qualified Health Information Network (QHIN) under the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA). When Oracle indicated it would begin the QHIN process at its October health summit, the company said cloud infrastructure would reduce the technology layers needed for electronic health information sharing.
A 2024 report by the Association of American Medical Colleges projects that by 2036, the nation will face a shortage of between 20,200 and 40,400 primary care physicians, but the strains on the system are already being felt. Under pressure to alleviate primary care shortages, health systems are continuing to develop more telehealth and retail clinic partnerships to reduce patient wait times to see a clinician.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency's proposed rule to establish special registrations for providers and telemedicine platforms to prescribe certain schedules of controlled substances without requiring an in-person doctor's visit requires "meaningful" clarification and adjustments, according to the American Telemedicine Association and ATA Action.
The U.S. healthcare system will reach a “dangerous threshold” of hospital bed occupancy by 2032 should population growth and workforce trends persist, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Medicine researchers warn. Their findings, published this week in JAMA Network Open, show that the country’s hospitals have already shifted from mean occupancy of about 64% through 2009 to 2019 to 75% in the year following the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency (May 2023 to April 2024).
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