Despite recent efforts to reduce readmission rates in the U.S., results from a report by the Dartmouth Atlas Project showed a large regional variation in 30-day readmission rates, particularly for Medicare beneficiaries post-acute care. The average readmission rate in the U.S. currently stand at 16.1 percent, which shows that more needs to be done to close gaps in care. To help get a handle on readmissions, providers from Spectrum Health have developed cardiac care solutions for patients to try and reduce heart failure readmissions.

A class action complaint has been filed against Stanford Hospitals and Clinics for the unlawful disclosure of confidential medication information obtained from patients on a public website.

Harris, an International communications and IT company based in Melbourne, Fla., has been awarded a $37 million contract by the National Cancer Institutes Center for Cancer Research, in which Harris will manage clinical data for the NCIs intramural clinical trials program.

The jurisdictional issues of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) are currently cloudy with a low chance of predictability in how the Supreme Court will resolve them, according to a perspective paper published Oct. 5 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

SALT LAKE CITYCarolyn M. Clancy, MD, director of Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), used a quotation from Peter Pronovost, MD, PhD, an intensive care physician from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore to lay out her keynote presentation at the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) conference: The fundamental problem with the quality of American medicine is that weve failed to view the delivery of healthcare as a science thats a mistake, a huge mistake.

Complementary approaches are needed to harness both retrospective and real-time data to identify potential study recruits and alert appropriate staff, according to an article published in an online article in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

Communications company Verizon and Duke University have formed a strategic agreement to jointly develop health IT initiatives to attempt to drive better care, expand access and lower costs.

A purported class action lawsuit was filed against Stanford Hospital & Clinics (SHC) and outside vendor Multi-Specialty Collection Services (MSCS) on grounds that MSCS caused some confidential information about patients who visited Stanford Hospitals emergency room to be posted on a website. SHC intends to vigorously defend the lawsuit that has been filed as it acted appropriately and did not violate the law as claimed in the lawsuit, an Oct. 3 statement from the Stanford, Calif.-based provider stated.