The healthcare sector accounts for 8.5% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. Health systems have a moral obligation to reduce these emissions, experts argued during HIMSS23. The panelists shared tips about climate change mitigation strategies, such as to ask all tech vendors for their carbon reduction plan and to look for savings in the energy budget.

A health system’s failure to offer patients with digital payment options could lead to slower collection times, create a disjointed patient financial experience, and result in decreased patient satisfaction and loyalty. At HIMSS23, Atrium Health’s vice president of revenue cycle management shared how his system integrated payment into its digital front door and gave pointers to hospitals looking to do the same.

Last week, New Mexico-based Presbyterian Healthcare Services and Midwest-based UnityPoint Health signed a letter of intent to merge. One consultant thinks these kinds of announcements will continue in the coming years, but a significant chunk of these intended mergers will end up being called off due to health systems realizing they’re not ready to make the sacrifices needed to reap the benefits of a megamerger.

Russian hacker group Killnet has claimed responsibility for a string of recent cyberattacks that took more than a dozen hospital websites offline across the U.S. — including the websites for Cedars-Sinai, Michigan Medicine, and UPMC. The group has been active for at least a year and is known to target countries that support and/or send resources to Ukraine.

M&A activity among health systems picked up last year — key trends included cross-market mega-mergers and academic medical centers expanding their community hospital networks. Despite tough economic conditions, Kaufman Hall experts expect this activity to continue growing in 2023.

Financial analysts have said that 2022 may have been the worst year for hospital finances in decades. This year looks like it will be yet another year of financial underperformance, with rural providers in especially dire circumstances.

Consolidated healthcare systems – even cross market systems – don’t have to raise their prices to have anticompetitive effects. They can leverage their size by using the volume of their purchases to extract discounts and other concessions from payers, national suppliers, and from labor pools.

After seeing their peers in Washington, and now New York, treat an onslaught of Covid-19 cases, hospitals in communities that haven’t been hit as hard yet are rushing to ready beds, ventilators and other needed equipment. MedCity News interviewed physicians across the U.S. to see how they are preparing for the next wave of the disease. 

The Seattle-based company, which spun out of Providence St. Joseph Health, has a platform that allows clinicians to prescribe and monitor digital health tools from their EHR workflows.

The North Carolina organizations aim to enter a final agreement later this year, which would include plans to develop a second Wake Forest School of Medicine campus in Charlotte.

Less than two months after MedCity speculated whether Amazon would release a HIPAA-compliant Echo device, the tech giant revealed Thursday that select skills for Alexa — the voice-activated personal assistant service powering those devices — are indeed HIPAA-compliant.

Rasu Shrestha, UPMC’s chief innovation officer and executive vice president of UPMC Enterprises, will join Atrium Health as its chief strategy officer in February 2019.

Between September 22 and September 29, 2018, an unauthorized third party gained access to the databases of AccuDoc Solutions, Atrium Health’s billing vendor.