Thirteen states today received from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) a total of $220 million in grants to build health insurance exchanges. Grant recipients include Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Nebraska, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Vermont.

Accountable care organizations (ACOs) will not deliver on their proponents’ promise of reducing costs and improving quality of care, Federal Trade Commissioner J. Thomas Rosch told an audience at the American Bar Association’s Antitrust Law Fall Forum in Washington, D.C., on November 17.

The transition to bundled health care payments remains several years away, with certain obstacles impeding progress in that direction, reveals a study by non-profit research organization Rand Corp.

The nomination of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Principal Deputy Marilyn Tavenner to lead the agency is garnering support among health care industry stakeholders.

The American College of Radiology (ACR) is asking imaging stakeholders attending this week’s Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) meeting in Chicago to urge members of Congress to support the Diagnostic Imaging Services Protection Act (H.R. 3269).

The Obama administration announced Wednesday the resignation of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Donald Berwick, MD. Berwick’s last day will be Friday, December 2, and his principal deputy administrator, Marilyn Tavenner, will serve as interim administrator until the Senate votes to make her appointment permanent.

Harvard Medical School’s Center for Biomedical Informatics (CBI) and health care benefits heavy-hitter Aetna have announced plans to initiate a research collaborative aimed at enhancing the quality and cost of health care. Researchers participating in the endeavor will employ bioinformatics to analyze health care data in new ways.

AHRA: The Association for Medical Imaging Management has approved the formation of an online data, analytics, and benchmarking tool in collaboration with radiology services and solutions provider Regents Health Resources, Inc., Franklin, Tennessee. The product will be developed with input from AHRA member facilities and will utilize Regents'