WellCare CEO Kenneth Burdick said the deal "will grow and diversify [WellCare's] Medicaid and Medicare Advantage businesses," in today's bite-sized hospital and health industry news from Alabama, Florida, Michigan, and Minnesota.
California's health insurance exchange beginning in 2020 will exclude hospitals that do not meet certain safety and quality targets from exchange plans' provider networks—a move that one expert says could have national implications.
Some major health care provider groups are praising CMS' recent proposal to allow Medicare providers to contract directly with patients, but others say the effort would be duplicative to CMS' other alternative payment models.
Gene-editing equipment and techniques have become more affordable and easier to use in recent years, giving birth to a new wave of "biohackers" who experiment with gene editing at home—a trend that some experts worry could be extremely dangerous, as these "citizen-scientists" operate with virtually no regulatory oversight, Emily Baumgaertner reports for the New York Times.
Grandview Medical Center in Ohio has implemented a provider-in-triage model for its ED that has cut ED wait times and reduced the number of patients who leave without being seen by a provider, Christopher Cheney writes for HealthLeaders Media.
A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that Puerto Rico's official death toll of 64 is "a substantial underestimate" and that the true figure is closer to about 4,600 excess deaths.
