Mar 30, 2009 | Laboratory News, Laboratory Pathology
Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) recently launched Project SwipeIT. This is an ambitious project to motivate the entire healthcare industry to adopt an electronic patient ID system by the end of 2009! The initiative asks insurers, providers, vendors and professional groups to commit to the deadline, as outlined by the Project SwipeIt portal on MGMA’s Website.
MGMA, a trade association of medical practice management professionals, estimates a nationwide electronic patient ID system could save providers $1 billion annually in unnecessary administrative costs and denied claims. Pathologists and laboratory administrators know that adoption of electronic patient ID would be a great benefit for clinical laboratories and pathology group practices.
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Mar 27, 2009 | Compliance, Legal, and Malpractice, Laboratory Management and Operations, Laboratory News, Laboratory Operations, Laboratory Pathology
Allegations of false claims implicate discounted client billing practices
It’s the first major whistleblower lawsuit in the laboratory industry in recent years. On March 20, California State Attorney General Edmund G. Brown Jr. announced that his state had joined a qui tam lawsuit that alleges a number of laboratories have filed false claims on a “massive” scale, thus defrauding the California Medi-Cal program of “hundreds of millions of dollars.”
The unusual twist in this whistleblower lawsuit is that it was originally filed by the owner of a California-based laboratory. In 2005, Chris Reidel, owner and CEO of Hunter Laboratories, in Campbell, California, initiated the legal action, alleging what AG Brown characterized as “massive Medi-Cal fraud and kickbacks. Medi-Cal is the state’s Medicaid health program for the poor.
The original lawsuit filed by Reidel seeks to recover at least $100 million. However, one of his attorneys, Joe Cotchett, of the San Francisco-based law firm of Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, believes the state’s actual losses could be more than $1 billion. The lawsuit is pending in San Mateo Superior Court and was filed under seal in 2005.
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Mar 26, 2009 | Digital Pathology, Laboratory News, Laboratory Pathology
Digital Pathology Imaging: Coming Soon to a Pathology Group near You!
Will pathologists soon say “sayonara” to glass slides? Plenty of smart money already bets the answer to that question is “yes”! Every pathologist in the United States and abroad should be watching developments in whole slide imaging and digital pathology systems. That’s because digital pathology imaging is a trend with momentum-and it also has the potential to be disruptive, although probably not in the short term.
One powerful sign that digital imaging in pathology is ready to go mainstream is the take-up of digital imaging solutions and digital pathology systems by leading pathology laboratories in the United States and developed countries across the globe. These are academic and tertiary center pathology labs, along with major private pathology companies. As the pathology profession’s first-movers and early adopters, it is these laboratories which set the pace for the entire profession. Their acceptance and growing use of digital imaging and digital pathology systems can be taken as evidence that the current generation of imaging and informatics technologies perform adequately.
However, there is another powerful force propelling digital imaging forward in anatomic pathology. It is the emergence of molecular assays which incorporate digital images and use either computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) or pattern recognition software to help the pathologist make a precise diagnosis. By design, these molecular tests require the pathologist to work from a digital image of the specimen. At The Dark Report‘s second annual Molecular Summit on the Integration of In Vivo and In Vitro Diagnostics, conducted last February in Philadelphia, examples of these types of emerging assays were abundant. (more…)
Mar 25, 2009 | Laboratory News, Laboratory Pathology
As previously suggested by earlier Dark Daily e-briefings, studies of the 46 million uninsured Americans suggest there’s more to this statistic than a big number implies. Up to two-thirds of the uninsured either qualify for government-sponsored insurance or could afford to buy coverage.
But no one disagrees that widespread layoffs and elimination of employer-sponsored health coverage are causing the ranks of the uninsured to swell. For every worker who loses health benefits, the multiplier is 3.14-the average size of the U.S. family. Thus, the loss of 3 mllion jobs over the last year translates to about 9.4 million people losing health coverage.
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Mar 23, 2009 | Laboratory News, Laboratory Pathology
Pathology and laboratory testing services are contracted by district health boards
Dateline: Christchurch, New Zealand-After two weeks of pathology meetings and lab site visits in Australia and New Zealand, your Dark Daily editor has gained new insights about pathology and laboratory medicine in these two English-speaking countries. One notable point is that, despite the fact that both countries have universal health coverage, their pathology and clinical laboratories are under significant financial stress.
This comes from a combination of factors. Their growing (and aging) populations are utilizing laboratory tests at increased volumes. At the same time, each government health system is using a variety of laboratory contracting practices to control spending on lab testing-thus steadily squeezing down the overall reimbursement paid to laboratories. Medical training programs in both countries are failing to graduate adequate numbers of pathologists and laboratory scientists. This is particularly true in New Zealand, where some rural regions are understaffed with adequate numbers of pathologists.
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