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Private patient advocates work as private consultants for patients and help manage health needs. Services vary from attending doctor visits, researching medical treatments, helping with medical equipment purchases to handling insurance claims, disputing hospital bills, and scheduling appointments.

Senate health committee leaders are launching an effort to help realize the promise of electronic health records to increase quality of care.

As hospitals and health systems work to develop population health strategies to better serve their communities and rein in the overall cost of care, behavioral health patients cannot be ignored.

Between November 2014 and January 2015, The Commonwealth Fund conducted an online survey of innovation centers affiliated with healthcare organizations to learn about their potential role in promoting health system transformation.

The lackluster uptake of the special enrollment period for exchange coverage is driven, in part, because for most people individual mandate penalties are much lower than actual costs of coverage.

A majority of recent drug development has been in therapies that qualify for at least one special approval pathway that Congress has passed over the past few decades for important drugs that treat life-threatening or rare diseases.

A one-minute look at managed care news during the week of April 27, 2015, including more good news for the much-anticipated PCSK9 inhibitors and growth in the individual insurance market enrollment.

Lung cancer patients who used statins in the year prior to a lung cancer diagnosis or after a lung cancer diagnosis had a reduction in the risk of death from the disease.

The federal government popped the cap off drug spending on Thursday, detailing doctor-by-doctor and drug-by-drug how Medicare and its beneficiaries spent $103 billion on pharmaceuticals in 2013.

In 2014, low- and moderate-income consumers were able to use premium subsidies to buy health coverage on Marketplaces under the Affordable Care Act. The individual health insurance market had been relatively flat for 3 years' prior.

The debate over including patient reported outcomes on oncology drug labels continues. The FDA expects well-defined and validated measurement tools and the patient community wants patient experiences to find their way to the label.

Accessing patient information in a health information exchange system during the 30 days after hospital discharge reduced the odds of readmission, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

Co-sponsored by Republican Fred Upton and Democrat Diana DeGette, the bill, in the works for month, aims to speed the pace of drug cures by removing unnecessary barriers from the regulatory process.

Pharmacy benefit manager Express Scripts Holding Co, which has aggressively negotiated lower costs of new hepatitis C drugs, on Wednesday said a new "focus area" will be subduing costs of a growing wave of pricey biotech cancer drugs.

A review of clinical registries determined data collection on patient outcomes are substandard and the information is not useful for patients, physicians, and policy makers, according to a paper published in the Journal for Healthcare Quality.

Today's call for Medicare to cover the Diabetes Prevention Program is part of a broader effort by advocacy groups and the AMA to identify those with prediabetes and intervene before people develop full-blown diabetes.

The study, "Medicine Use and Spending Shifts: A Review of the Use of Medicines in the U.S. in 2014," found that total dollars spent on medications in the country rose 13.1%, up from a 3.2% increase in 2013.

Although practices saw a decrease in patient visits during the 2 years after electronic health record implementation, they reported an increase in revenue during that same time period, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

Amgen might be the latest entrant in the immunotherapy realm if the FDA heeds the advice of an independent advisory panel, recommending Amgen's anticancer viral therapy, T-Vec, for melanoma treatment.

Only 34 countries have national plans to fight the global threat of antibiotic resistance, meaning few are prepared to tackle "superbug" infections which put even basic healthcare at risk, the WHO said on Wednesday.

The authors conducting the research attribute the higer cost in part to more frequent adverse events and hospital-based healthcare within 30 days of their surgical procedure.

A press release by Bristol-Myers Squibb announced their filing of a supplemental Biologics License Application for Opdivo (nivolumab) in the treatment of previously untreated individuals with advanced melanoma.

Anthem Inc. said a major effort to overhaul how it pays primary care doctors appears to be lowering overall healthcare costs, as patients spend less time in the hospital.

The study, called the the SLIMM-T2D (Surgery or Lifestyle with Intensive Medical Management in Treatment of Type 2 Diabetes) trial, was published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism and observed similar improvements in blood sugar control a year after gastric band surgery or being on a group-based weight management program.

House Republicans say that Medicaid takes up too much of the state's budget for them not to have more say in who receives it. They also included budget language calling for Medicaid officials to ask CMS to allow healthcare savings accounts for almost all beneficiaries.

Industry experts at the National Association for Healthcare Quality's National Quality Summit highlighted improving care through successful care transitions.

Despite a general sense that engaging in big data analytics is important for success in the current health information technology landscape, 51% of organizations do not truly know what kind of data-or how much of it-they need to collect

The consortium, called CANCER-ID, is a partnership between 33 organizations across 13 European nations focused on establishing the clinical utility of liquid biopsies in patients with NSCLC and HER2-resistant breast cancer.

Opioid-dependent patients treated at an emergency department (ED) who were given buprenorphine were more likely to engage in addiction treatment to reduce their opioid use, according to a study published in JAMA.

WHile CMS is trying to lighten doctors' loads to help them cope with mandatory patient engagment requirements, patient advocates are unhappy with the proposed changes.