Videotape surgical procedures for better quality, fewer malpractice suits; Convoluted code mappings to ICD-10 could be costly;

News From Around the Web

> Furthering the consolidation trend, Hudson Holdco, which is rebranding itself as CarePoint Health, is expanding its insurance plans and uniting its three hospitals into one health system, The Star-Ledger reported. Article

> Physicians can improve care quality and prevent malpractice lawsuits by videotaping surgical procedures, a doctor at Atlanta's Shepherd Center for brain and spinal-cord injury wrote in an opinion piece in The Miami Herald. Article

> The recent Kaiser Permanente election to the Service Employees International Union and the National Union of Healthcare Workers - California Nurses Association show strong labor unionization efforts in healthcare, according to Thomson Reuters. Article

> The Maryland Hospital Association sent a letter to state health officials opposing a proposal that would link medical spending to the state's economic growth, reported The Baltimore Sun. Article

Health IT News

> Crowdsourcing can be an effective means of labeling medically relevant terms that could then be used in statistical tools to provide sentence-level context results, a study from Stanford University found. Article

> New research from the University of Illinois at Chicago illustrates yet another reason to get a jump on ICD-10 implementation: Mapping the 50,000 new medical diagnosis codes and 70,000 new procedure codes from ICD-9 is far from clear-cut. Article

And Finally… Hungry shoppers beware. Article