Healthcare Roundup: Nursing Upsurge, Medicaid Defended, Cleveland Clinic Outrages Patients, and More

(MoneyWatch)  Nurses Come in From The Cold - Because of the recession, nurses are returning to their profession, alleviating the nursing shortage. In 2007 and 2008, about 250,000 nurses entered the workforce, swelling its ranks by 18 percent. Apparently, much of this increase is due to nurses who went back to work because their spouses were laid off and/or lost benefits. About half of the returnees are over 50, and many are young women with children under 6. [Source: Wall Street Journal]

Court Defends Medicaid on Medical Necessity - A federal appeals court has ruled that Georgia's Medicaid program can deny payment for pediatric services that it considers medically unnecessary. The case involves a 12-year-old girl who needed skilled nursing care. The state limited the number of hours of care that Medicaid would cover. A spokesman for the Florida Pediatric Society, which filed an amicus brief with the court, says that Medicaid programs often override doctors' decisions for economic reasons. [Source: American Medical News]

Cleveland Clinic Fee Sparks Uproar - Many patients are angry at the Cleveland Clinic because it recently started charging them a "facility fee" for outpatient doctor visits and procedures. Because private insurers usually don't cover this fee, it raises the patients' out of pocket costs considerably. An increasing number of hospitals across the country are said to be charging these fees to help compensate for their recession-fueled decline in revenues. There are moves afoot in Wisconsin and Washington State to force hospitals to inform patients about these fees upfront. [Source: Cleveland Plain Dealer]

GE Moves to Finance EHRs - General Electric Capital will provide zero-interest financing to physicians who buy the company's electronic health record systems until government EHR subsidies begin in 2011. The manufacturer is also guaranteeing that its systems will meet whatever certification criteria are required to qualify for the government incentives. [Source: Modern Healthcare]

MEDecision and Availity Partner - MEDecision, which uses insurance company claims data to provide "clinical summaries" to physicians, is partnering with Availity, a leading claims clearinghouse and provider of real-time claims adjudication, to improve the delivery of "actionable" patient information to doctors. The partnership will allow a degree of integration between Availity's secure web portal and MEDecision's health information exchange service. MEDecision is owned by the Health Care Services Corp., a multi-state aggregation of Blues plans that does business with Availity. [Source: Business Wire]

Correction - In the original version of the post titled "Is Government Health IT Program Overreaching?", a quote was incorrectly attributed to Christine Bechtel of the National Partnership for Women & Families. The speaker was actually Gayle Harrell, a former Florida state legislator who is a member of the Health IT Policy Committee.