Healthcare Blog
Will the 800 LB Net Gorilla Become A Major Healthcare Disruptor?
Don’t look now but behemoth Amazon, the largest internet retailer in the world, is already on its way to becoming a disruptive force in health care. Already. Amazon has begun selling medical supplies and equipment in the U.S. and specific medical products globally,...
What’s Ahead For the Health Insurance Market in 2019
Despite failed attempts over the past year to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the Trump Administration has moved ahead with administrative changes to dilute the law by allowing for short-term and association health plans that circumvent certain ACA protections...
New Lab Research Report Unveils Key Findings
Get ready for some major market challenges ahead in the $97 billion U.S. laboratory industry according to a new research report, "The U.S. Clinical Laboratory Industry Forecast & Trends 2018-2020," published by Laboratory Economics. Among the counter intuitive...
Opening Up Pandora’s Box: CMS To Redo CLIA Personnel Requirements
Coming like a shot out the the blue, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Centers may have opened up a real hornet’s nest in asking for public input on who should be allowed to perform testing in U.S. laboratories as defined by the Clinical Laboratory Improvement...
Did CMS Manipulate Market-Based Lab Rates for 2018?
Despite strong opposition from significant portions of the clinical laboratory industry, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) went ahead to issue final Clinical Laboratory Fee Schedule (CLFS) market-based prices which slashed many lab test rates by 10...
Labs & AP Groups Must Get Smarter in Collecting From Patients in the Era of Higher Deductibles
Rising out-of-pocket costs by healthcare consumers are creating a major financial challenge for all types of providers including laboratories and anatomic pathology groups which are seeing growing bad debt directly attributable to the increasing numbers of...
Draconian Cuts Ahead For U.S. Labs Under PAMA’s Market-Based Pricing Approach
What’s the bottom-line for labs? About three quarters of all test codes on the revised CLFS would have their payment amounts reduced under the weighted median of private payor rates while a mere 10% would be raised.