News, Analysis, Trends, Management Innovations for
Clinical Laboratories and Pathology Groups

Hosted by Robert Michel

News, Analysis, Trends, Management Innovations for
Clinical Laboratories and Pathology Groups

Hosted by Robert Michel
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More Transparency for Provider Prices and Quality Is Goal of Employers and Private Payers During 2013

Clinical laboratories and pathology groups will soon find it important to make it easier for patients to price for medical laboratory tests

Value-based reimbursement is the new frontier for the American healthcare system. Surveys show that employers and insurers are actively pushing the healthcare marketplace to a value-based, competitive paradigm. This means providers—including pathology groups and clinical laboratories—will be asked to deliver greater transparency in both the price and quality of their clinical services. (more…)

Federal Government Agrees to Open Access to Medicare Data about Individual Doctors

Experts predict employers will use this data to create “report cards” on individual physicians

In a big step forward for public access to data about provider outcomes, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will make its enormous Medicare claims database more broadly available to the public. Both the press and the public will be able to search for information about individual physicians. It is likely that information about pathologists will be searchable in this manner.

Specifically, Medicare will relax its restrictions on the release of information about individual doctors who participate in Medicare. This development was reported recently by The Wall Street Journal, which played a role in getting HHS to make physician data available to the public.

“This is a giant step forward in making our health care system more transparent,” stated Marilyn Tavenner, Medicare’s Acting Administrator. (more…)

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