The US finds itself woefully unprepared to perform enough COVID-19 testing to identify and quarantine infected patients at scale, slowed by test development regulations; a disbanded White House pandemic response team; and a lack of coordination between local, state and federal governments. This lack of “systemness” in the healthcare system has left clinical laboratories scrambling to receive testing approval from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and ramp up production. Fortunately, testing guidelines were loosened by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) at the end of February, allowing academic labs and large commercial labs like Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp to quickly… Read entire article here
The 21st Century Cures Act and its Impact on Health IT Some important healthcare legislation was passed early last week that you might have missed, but which has even more relevance given the significant care coordination challenges in dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak, testing, and quarantine requirements. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) passed the Cures Act Final Rule, which is designed to provide patients and providers secure access to health information. Meanwhile, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) passed the CMS Interoperability and Patient Access Final Rule, which is designed to provide… Read entire article here
Last week, we participated in the Diagnostic Coverage and Reimbursement Conference in San Diego. It was an intimate gathering that brought together executives from diagnostics and genomics laboratories, and payers to openly discuss reimbursement, market access, and revenue cycle challenges and what can be done to address them. The two topics that permeated most discussions were prior authorization and price transparency. Prior Authorization There was consensus among all attendees that the increase in prior authorization requests has been problematic and that providers and payers need to work collaboratively to improve adoption, reduce physician abrasion and — most importantly — provide… Read entire article here
As we look back at 2019, the seeds of active and emerging healthcare industry trends begin to come into sharper focus for 2020. Many of the articles forecasting 2020 trends for the healthcare market read more like predictions from fortune-tellers — so vague and obvious that they cannot possibly be incorrect, but also so vague and obvious that they provide the reader no value. We'd like to take a different approach. What we attempt to do here is dive beneath the superficial talking points and instead, provide our take on less discussed trends that we are observing directly from the trenches. Providing a more… Read entire article here
