Healthcare wasn’t exactly priority number one in President Donald Trump’s inaugural address this morning. In fact, despite the apparently looming repeal of the Affordable Care Act, the only reference to healthcare in the whole speech was a vague promise, buried with two or three other vague promises, to "to free the Earth from the miseries of disease”. Whether this is a veiled promise to increase...
This weekend, HealthCare.gov was updated to include a new feature that offers consumers detailed information about health insurance plans offered in their area before they apply for health insurance. The update comes just five days before open enrollment begins on November 15.
“Consumers can prepare for open enrollment by visiting HealthCare.gov and using the window shopping feature to see what...
Employers are turning more and more to preventative wellness programs to keep down their employee's eventual healthcare costs, including biometric screenings to determine early risk factors. But when those screenings are mandatory, and incentivized through sanctions for opting out rather than rewards for opting in, does that cross the line into violating employee's privacy? Has the employer...
The New Mexico Health Insurance Exchange (NMHIX) partnered with Voxiva this month to launch a text message-based campaign in the hopes of encouraging New Mexicans to enroll in the exchange before the March 31, 2014 ObamaCare deadline.
To use the service, anyone local interested in enrolling in the exchange can text BeWellNM to 311411. They will then receive an automated text response prompting...
Four years ago Congress created a new Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation as part of its Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The Innovation Center's purpose was “to test innovative payment and service delivery models to reduce program expenditures... while preserving or enhancing quality of care.” Congress has allotted $10 billion to support the Innovation Center for its first ten...
Two University of New Mexico-trained physicians and a business school professor launched an app, Get Covered New Mexico, to spread information to New Mexico residents about getting covered through the Affordable Care Act.
Professor at the University of New Mexico Nick Flor, Dr. Erin Corriveau and Dr. Kate McCalmont decided to develop the app after Corriveau attended a community meeting in a...
The US Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health IT is slowing its rollout launch of a website meant to encourage patients to take a more active role in their own care.
ONC will wait until verifying that all the data on Blue Button Connector, a planned hub for consumers to find sources of health data to download as well as Blue Button Plus technology to facilitate it, is accurate,...
Weight Watchers online portal and app.
This week in mobile health, we saw FDA clearances for Alere and Verizon, trials from Scripps and Qualcomm, and some interesting new products in the consumer health sphere from Beddit, Emotiv, and BioBeats. Some other articles from around the web have also highlighted mobile health trends. Here's some interesting pieces that caught our eyes this week.
The...
We've all heard the election post-mortem by now. President Obama's surprisingly comfortable re-election — along with the continued split control of Congress — means that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a., Obamacare, is here to stay, although some Republican governors are deciding to let the federal government run their states' health insurance exchanges and are opting out of...
Perhaps you've seen last month's report from Kaiser Health News that more than 2,200 hospitals—almost two-thirds of all U.S. acute care facilities—face Medicare payment deductions starting Oct. 1 because too many patients with three common but treatable conditions were readmitted within 30 days of initial discharge. That's going to cost those hospitals a total of $280 million during federal...
