Insurer-Physician Collaboration Improves Quality of Care, Patient Compliance, and Lowers Costs NEWARK and EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J., — A first-in-the-nation, ground breaking pilot program has produced empirical data demonstrating the effectiveness of the Patient Centered Medical Home (PC-MH), a concept of care that facilitates partnerships between individual patients and their personal physicians and — when appropriate […]

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor http://features.us.reuters.com WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Dr. Howard Stark’s office is quiet. Very quiet. No patients sit in his waiting room. No receptionist answers the telephone. Stark does not have a receptionist. Instead, he and his assistant Michele Norris-Bell check e-mail alerts on handheld devices and — between seeing patients […]

http://www.dcmedmalblog.com Hundreds of thousands of children in the U.S. face the prospect of a life-threatening asthma attack at a time when they have no health insurance, according to a new study recently published in the journal Ambulatory Pediatrics. Researchers utilized data collected in 2003 and 2004 at the National Center for Health Statistics and determined […]

By VANESSA FUHRMANS http://online.wsj.com Health plans are drawing scrutiny for offering financial incentives to entice doctors to prescribe cheaper generic medicines, including paying doctors $100 each time they switch a patient from a brand-name drug. Pharmaceutical companies have long gone to great lengths to try to get doctors to prescribe their brand-name pills. They spend […]

By Serena Gordon HealthDay Reporter http://www.washingtonpost.com A co-pay as small as $10 can stand in the way of a woman getting a potentially lifesaving mammography, new research suggests. When women in Medicare managed-care plans were asked to contribute a small co-pay, in some cases around $10 to $20, 8 percent of the women decided to […]

http://www.prnewswire.com/ Starting Feb. 1, 2008, MHA Insurance Company will grant a premium credit of up to 5 percent for qualifying policyholders who utilize an Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system. A qualifying policyholder would include independent solo physicians and group physician practices. Currently, MHA Insurance Company provides medical professional liability insurance to more than 3,000 independent […]

Health Plans Say New Rules Improve Safety and Cut Costs; Hospitals Can’t Dun Patients By VANESSA FUHRMANS http://online.wsj.com/ Health insurers are taking a new tack in a bid to improve patient safety and reduce health-care costs: refusing to pay — or let their patients be billed — for hospital errors. Aetna Inc., WellPoint Inc. and […]

http://blog.canadianemr.ca The Canadian 2007 National Physician Survey is now available. 26.1% of physicians use a combination of Electronic and Paper charts as their record keeping system. 9.8% of physicians use Electronic Charts instead of Paper Charts. This number indicates that we still have a long way to go in order to fully enable our physician […]

A Fort Washington firm offers health-care clients a chance to hear what they say to one another. By Linda Loyd Inquirer Staff Writer http://www.philly.com When Zaccary Newsham-Quinn, 4, visits his pediatrician in Levittown, the doctor, Nathan Zankman, asks if he would be willing to have their conversation recorded for use in medical research. Zaccary’s mother, […]