Sky-high medical bills have forced many individuals to turn to crowdsourcing to pay what they owe, according to the CEO of GoFundMe, who spoke on CBS MoneyWatch.

Implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) did not make a significant impact on breast cancer care at a safety net hospital in California, according to findings published in the American Journal of Surgery. The authors noted, however, that more patients did have health insurance in the two years following implementation.

In 2018, the FDA approved a total of 106 new medical devices including medical imaging technologies—surpassing their record in 2017 of 99 novel device approvals, according to a recent statement from FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD, and Jeff Shuren, MD, director of the Center for Devices and Radiological Health.

Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health, a New Hampshire-based health system that serves 1.9 million people across New England, and GraniteOne Health, a network of New Hampshire hospitals, have signed a letter of intent to merge.

Mandating pharmaceutical companies to disclose drug prices as part of Direct-to-Consumer Pharmaceutical Advertising (DTCPA) may reduce consumer interest in high-priced drugs. But the inclusion of modifiers indicating consumers will have zero out-of-pocket costs weakened the finding, according to the results of a behavioral experiment published in JAMA Internal Medicine. 

Five major pharmaceutical companies could each lose $500 million or more in revenue per year if a proposal from the Trump administration to reimburse Medicare Part B drugs based on an international pricing index (IPI) is finalized.

Hospitals are now conducting wealth screenings with software that culls public data to see which patients are most likely to donate to the healthcare organization, The New York Times reported. The practice is increasingly common across hospitals, particularly large systems.

Deal volumes broke records in 2018 across the health services sector, and deal activity is likely to remain high in 2019 thanks to a number of positive market factors, according to PwC’s latest health services deals insights.