Revenue cycle, payer fights, staffing, and running a practice that still runs in five years.
An inspector general table ranks state Medicaid hepatitis C treatment rates. By our estimate, five states hold 37 percent of 113,000 untreated patients.
A Jacksonville family physician left corporate medicine for direct primary care, betting that time and trust matter more than volume.
Dr. Daniel Bekele runs North City Urgent Care 13 hours a day, six days a week, blending walk-in access with the continuity of primary care.
KFF's 2026 Employer Health Benefits Survey, released Oct. 22, puts the average family premium at $28,303, up 5 percent, and the worker share at $7,471, up 9 percent. The average single deductible held near $1,955.
Amazon, Axon, Google, Meta and Oracle signed a statement, announced Oct. 21 by CMS and the Labor Department, urging insurers to make electronic prior authorization tools available to self-funded plans. CMS says those plans cover more than 180 million people.
CMS's preliminary 2027 Clinical Laboratory Fee Schedule rates are about 16 percent lower on average, with cuts capped at 15 percent per test per year through 2029. Practices with in-office labs have days left to comment.
Open enrollment runs Oct. 15 through Dec. 7. CMS projects a 16.5 percent drop in the average Medicare Advantage premium for 2027, but premium averages say little about whether your patients keep their physicians and drugs.
A survey of 1,185 U.S. adults in JAMA Network Open found 63.1 percent would wait for a doctor or nurse to review an AI answer to a medical portal message. For scheduling and refills, 57.4 percent chose the five-minute AI reply.
A proposed rule published Oct. 8 would permit virtual access under a lab's certificate, ease director qualifications and let dermatologists direct Mohs labs by board certification. Cytology is excluded from remote review.
More than 5,500 cardiologists and back pain specialists are on the final list for Medicare's mandatory Ambulatory Specialty Model. Performance year one starts Jan. 1, 2027, and it sets Part B adjustments of up to 9 percent either way in 2029.
Concierge medicine promises easier access, longer visits and a closer relationship with a primary care physician. Traditional primary care reaches far more patients at a lower direct cost. San Francisco internist Dr. Sanjay Raisoni offers a useful view into what changes when medicine gives time back to the doctor and patient.
Letters to 24 of the largest healthcare services companies say meeting CMS price transparency rules is not a safe harbor under federal consumer protection law, especially for scheduled, non-emergency care.
CMS has released final scores for the 2025 performance year, and they set your 2027 Medicare payment adjustment. Practices get one chance to challenge a scoring error, and the clock is tied to a date CMS has not announced yet.
Patients judge clinical quality by experiences they can understand. The first ninety seconds matter more than most physicians think.
Prior auth is usually discussed as a frustration. Treated as an operations problem, it becomes something a practice can measure, staff for, and push back on.
What independent groups should know before signing a risk arrangement, and the three numbers to model first.
Claim denials are usually treated as a billing nuisance. Read carefully, they reveal exactly where registration, documentation, and authorization workflows are breaking down upstream.
Documentation integrity is not a billing department project. Physicians who document their thinking clearly get paid more accurately, face less audit risk, and write notes colleagues can use.
Independent practices often assume commercial payer rates are take it or leave it. Many are more negotiable than they appear, if you arrive with data and a clear story.
Turnover among front-line clinical staff drains practices of money, morale, and physician time. The fixes are often less about pay alone and more about growth, respect, and workload.
Missed appointments feel like patient behavior. In practice, they often reflect how far out visits are booked, how reminders work, and how hard it is to reschedule.
Many physician owners glance at the bottom line and little else. A few key measures, reviewed monthly, reveal the health of a practice long before trouble becomes a crisis.
Practices spend weeks evaluating features and minutes reviewing contracts. The terms that govern data, pricing, and leaving often matter more than anything shown in the demo.
Estimates, payment plans, and billing conversations shape whether patients come back. Designed well, they protect revenue and trust at the same time instead of trading one for the other.
By our count the AMA adopted 15 policies at its Nov. 6-9 meeting, including a bar on licensing AI as a physician and EHR alerts for downcoded claims.
The FDA approved pimicotinib on Nov. 10 after a 56 percent week-25 response rate, the third CSF-1R inhibitor for TGCT and the only one dosed daily.
Orforglipron cut sleep apnea events 12 to 13 an hour more than placebo in ATTAIN-OSA, against 20 to 24 on tirzepatide's label, largely tracking weight loss.
The VA inspector general's 2026 survey found severe physician shortages at 135 of 139 facilities, with radiology, urology and anesthesiology rising most.
