News From Around the Web
> Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is moving from social networking into personal fitness and wellness software, and aims to develop a platform focused on motivating users to get healthy, according to a Bloomberg report. "For wellness professionals, from fitness coaches to physical therapists and nutritionists and more, our platform will be the easiest and most flexible way to extend expertise and guidance by orders of magnitude," Costolo shared in a tweet. The platform, explained Costolo, will extend beyond measurement to motivate and drive improvement. Article
Health Insurance News
> Imposing high deductibles on health plans does not, in fact, encourage individuals to shop around more for better healthcare prices, according to a new research letter from the Journal of the American Medical Association. Because of this finding, "there is a need for greater availability of price information and innovative approaches to enrollee engagement," the letter states. Article
> The large surge in health insurance enrollment at the end of 2015 has resulted in problems for thousands of insurance customers in the new year. Brokers and insurers in several states said they've been inundated with complaints from customers, including the failure to receive their insurance ID cards and billing errors. Complaints have come from customers with individual plans and those with coverage through small businesses. Article
Health IT News
> Intersecting trends are making the timing right for patient-driven health information exchange, according to a perspective article published in The New England Journal of Medicine by authors Kenneth Mandl, M.D., and Isaac S. Kohane, M.D. Efforts to create patient-controlled online data vaults go back as far as 1994, yet efforts such as Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault failed. Article
> Overall, rural providers have adopted Meaningful Use at about the same rate as urban providers, however, greater disparities persist between different rural practices, new research shows. About 82 percent of rural physicians adopted electronic health record systems in 2013, compared to 78 percent of urban ones, according to a study published in Health Affairs. Article
And Finally... A zinnia grows in space. Article