News From Around the Web
> Health Level Seven International, which creates health IT interoperability standards, announced this week that much of its intellectual property will be available for free under licensing terms. The policy includes all currently published standards, implementation guides and other IP "as determined on a case-by-case basis." Announcement
> Insurance companies in Missouri soon could be required to cover medical services provided electronically if similar service is covered for an in-person visit, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported. The state's senate, last week, approved telemedicine legislation, ensuring that such coverage also would not be subject to higher co-pays or deductibles than regular visits. The legislation now moves on to the state's House. Article
Mobile Health News
> Interoperability is a critical step in supporting scalable mobile healthcare solutions, and can bring many benefits to providers and payers, but adoption of standards and guidelines has been inconsistent, according to a recent article from PwC. The problem, says PwC, is the status quo of proprietary, closed end-to-end solutions "intended to create a dedicated customer base and a competitive advantage" resulting in systems that are "disparate and difficult to integrate" in which "only the vendor seems to know the secret on how to unlock the data." Article
Health Finance News
> Hospitals in Pennsylvania and California may see changes to tax exemption rules--lawmakers in both states are considering legislation that would clarify the work hospitals need to do to preserve their not-for-profit status. In California, Assembly Bill 975 would mandate not-for-profit hospitals spend a minimum of 8 percent of their annual operating margin on charity care starting in 2015. Article
Provider News
> Despite increasing industry insights into how deeply patients are bothered by long waits to see a physician, the problem appears to be getting worse, according to a new Vitals Physician Wait Time report. According to Vitals' analysis of patient-reported wait times from its database of more than 870,000 physicians, the shortest average wait time to see a doctor increased by more than a minute from 2011 to 2012. Article
And Finally ... Thanks, but no thanks. Article