incentive news from FierceHealthcare

With a physician shortage and pay-for-performance shift hanging over the industry, some healthcare organizations have been incentivizing physicians to increase the availability of high-quality care. Read more...

A new CIO is in town. Not to be confused with chief information officer, a growing breed of "chief incentive officers" is infusing the healthcare industry with the new-found emphasis on cost savings Read more...

Of late, some employers and health plans have been working hard to collect funds from accident victims who win civil settlements. The practice, known as "subrogation," had been in ill repute Read more...

While it's far from an established practice, physicians are increasingly beginning to sell prescription drugs in their offices. Right now, only 10 percent of U.S. physicians do so, but the number Read more...

A group of eight economics professors have filed a friend-of-the-court brief arguing that the FTC's decision on Evanston (IL) Northwest Healthcare's merger simply doesn't work. The professors argue Read more...

Next week, rock band Radiohead is doing something that, to my knowledge, no other major rock act has done. The group will soon be selling digital versions of its new album, "In Rainbows," Read more...

CMS is lowering the boom on physician self-referral, setting plans to ban Medicare payments for many self-referred services. New CMS rules on this subject, which are part of regs proposed for the Read more...

Here's another dispatch from the Read more...

No one argues that over the long term, managing diabetes intelligently can cut down on long-term medical costs by stemming hugely expensive complications. The question is, do such management programs pay off over the short term? If not, health plans have little incentive to address the problem, according to one analysis. Article

When patients get a call from an anonymous disease management staff nurse, they don't have a lot of incentive to participate in the management program. But there's other ways to get the job done. A new program developed by tire maker Goodyear found that if disease management programs bring a trusted clinician on site, enrollment in such programs jumped dramatically. Enrollment was particularly high if patients were invited to participate during a scheduled visit with a familiar clinician, according to research by CHD Meridian Healthcare. Release