Wellness

The Affordable Care Act and the troubled launch of the federal insurance exchange have bolstered the business case for data sharing and consumer engagement, according to eHealth Initiative's latest survey of health information exchange systems.

After Tuesday’s news that CMS wants to recruit more brokers to enroll consumers on Healthcare.gov, the group made the first public announcement Wednesday about a broker-focused website improvement.

Despite taking Healthcare.gov offline for hours a day to make technological fixes, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said Wednesday the site continued to experience multiple slowdowns and displayed error messages to numerous visitors throughout the day.

Employers and HR professionals will have to come to terms with the most common (but hopefully not absolutely systemic) reality for employees: rates will, in some cases, go up. That’s a simple fact of life, and you can blame the ACA all you want, but the truth is that health care rates were likely to inch marginally anyhow.

If people with chronic conditions only spend about an hour a year with their physician, how can they stay adherent with medication and their disease education for the 8,759 hours they’re outside the doctor’s office? The most promising answer is through mobile devices.

The majority of employers questioned by the NEBGH cite “employees’ poor health habits” as one of their top three obstacles to maintaining affordable health coverage.

Following the Oct. 1 launch of the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges, nearly half (48%) of Americans nationwide say the federal government did a “poor” job of implementing the law in a new Kaiser survey.

As the Obama administration works to fix the technological problems associated with Healthcare.gov, greater issues with the federal health care exchanges remain, said a panel of health care experts Thursday in Washington.

A debrief on the types of changes that trigger the loss of grandfathered status, the concept at the center of the “if you like your plan, you can keep it” issue.

With the online site expected to face difficulties through November, Americans may have only weeks to find replacement coverage, and many may end up paying higher premiums.