Industry Analysis

Patients are likely to continue to choose to recover at home rather than go to skilled nursing facilities, according to a new report by Trella Health.

Equity is a central part of healthcare quality, but health plans often lack information on individual members’ race and ethnicity, making assessing and improving health outcomes challenging.

Coverage requirements may result in premium hikes next year, say some health plan executives.

Like the entirety of the world, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed many issues in the medical industry. One area in particular: the clinical trials space developed many challenges as a result to the height and continuous battle of the pandemic.

CDC figures from June 2020 show that about 41% of adults had opted to delay visiting a medical provider. Now, 20-plus months later, care avoidance of common chronic and acute conditions has only worsened.

Most Health plans and much of healthcare, overall, have had their feet on the gas when it comes to more patient-centered care or consumer choice services. COVID-19 has clearly made it all about the consumer in many ways, but more specifically, in making care much more accessible.

A look at the challenges hospitals face due to an insufficient supply chain—and how to address them.

Main Line Health in suburban Philadelphia has solicited ideas for inventions from nurses. Barbara Wadsworth, the healthcare system’s chief operating officer with 35 years experience as a nurse, has invented a device for cushioning patient falls in the bathroom.

Hiring assistants that work virtually and outsourcing medical coding are two ways that providers can navigate through these times of increasing cost pressures and staffing shortages.

In the sixth year of Medicare’s Independence at Home Demonstration program, the initiative saved $41 per member per month, an amount that CMS says was not statistically significant and was lower than the savings the program produced in earlier years.

The Community Aging in Place—Advancing Better Living for Elders (CAPABLE) program developed at the university’s nursing school is designed to keep older people who are frail, have chronic medical conditions or can’t complete activities of daily living in their homes by providing care and help from conventional healthcare professionals — nurses, occupational therapists — but also from people who can do minor house repairs.

Keeping older people in their homes has cost and care advantages. Yet Medicare and Medicaid are still geared toward paying for care in institutionalized settings.

Special purpose acquisition companies took off as investment vehicles in healthcare. Increased regulatory oversight and some flagging stock prices may cool off the trend.

A Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that all the responding programs had at least one initiative to expand behavioral health services.

A 2022 report by the Department of Labor cites specific examples of health plans and health insurance issuers failing to ensure parity. For instance, a health insurance issuer covered nutritional counseling for medical conditions like diabetes, but not for mental health conditions such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge-eating disorder.

Walmart seems to be pulling back and opioid litigation looms.

The biggest concern of the respondents to our State of the Industry survey was misinformation about vaccines on social media.

The company is expanding the reach of Amazon Care and partnering with health systems and senior living companies to support at-home care.

For many people, telehealth is an inviting option. But some insurers are offering health plans that make it the main way by which people receive primary care.

Cost pressures may increase as the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund runs low, but the reliance on telehealth that the pandemic wrought is likely to continue, especially for mental health services.

A large majority of respondents see a future of endemic COVID-19, but the survey also identified some confidence that the current crop of vaccines will protect against new variants.

Results of our survey show some tempering of expectation for addressing healthcare disparities and what can be accomplished this year.

Remote care technology and drug price limits garnered the most votes for having the biggest effect on the cost and delivery of U.S. healthcare.

Most of the respondents to our question about optimism of notable improvements in healthcare were in the mild middle.

This year’s State of the Industry focused on the year ahead.

The discount retailer signaled this summer that it was preparing to get into the delivery of healthcare.

At the state and local levels, an increasing number of markets are dominated by one or a handful of insurers. Experts say it is part of a vicious cycle of payers responding to provider consolidation and vice versa.

The Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines introduced much of the world to ribonucleic acid (RNA), which has long played second fiddle to DNA. But in addition to the messenger RNA vaccines, treatments targeting and using RNA in a variety of ways are filling the pipeline and exciting researchers and drug developers.

The agency has been in the spotlight because of the pandemic, questions about its independence and the approval of Aduhelm. The stakes are high and the politics, fraught.

The medical cannabis market is expected to register a compound annual growth rate of 18.4% crossing the value of $33.2 Billion by 2027.