The hype around blockchain had reached new heights at HIMSS18 in Las Vegas, much of it centered on how an immutable, decentralized ledger of transactions and exchanges could be used to solve issues around interoperability and data sharing. Jason Goldwater, MA, MPA, senior director of the CedarBridge Group suggested it could streamline another headache for healthcare professionals: quality reporting.

Patients in the United States pay about $5,000 per person on healthcare but are not healthier than people in other countries. In article by The Economist, authors examined exactly where the money goes, and which firms profit the most.

Most women in rural India are unaware of how to examine themselves for breast cancer, and one in three have never heard of breast cancer at all, according to a dissertation delivered at Umeå University in Umeå, Sweden.

Nearly one-third of practicing radiologists in the U.S. report job-related lower back pain, according to the American College of Radiology’s most recent commission workforce survey—and they’re not the only ones complaining.

In the midst of threats to the Affordable Care Act and pushes for more dramatic shifts to single-payer healthcare, some Democrats in Congress and state legislatures have begun proposing a different option: allowing people to buy into Medicaid. But not all those proposals would achieve their goals in the same way, argue Duke University researcher David Anderson, MSPPM, and Harvard University PhD student and former CMS spokesperson Emma Sandoe.

The last few months in mergers and acquisition (M&A) activity in healthcare have been dominated by massive deals proposed across sectors—like drugstore chain CVS Health wanting to buy health insurer Aetna for $69 billion. What those companies should watch for, writes Morning Consult’s Jon Reid, is the result of the case challenging a merger with similar dynamics: the combination of AT&T and Time Warner.

For-profit hospital giant HCA has entered into discussions to acquire Mission Health, a nonprofit six-hospital system based out of Asheville, North Carolina, in a deal Mission admitted may result in some jobs being eliminated.

A long-standing agreement between three rural Montana hospitals—Monida Shared Imaging—recently added a second mobile MRI unit to bring state-of-the-art equipment to areas that would have been without, Kpax.com reports.