Jeff Lagasse

The Department of Health and Human Services is establishing a number of grant programs, encompassing $43.7 million worth of funding, that are intended to strengthen mental health and substance use services for those with HIV and AIDS.

In the spring of 2020, the virus that causes COVID-19 was tearing across the country and wreaking havoc on patients and on the healthcare systems that served them. No hospital, system or ancillary facility was left unaffected.
In South Dakota, when the…

In recognition of the difficulties faced by healthcare workers, President Biden has signed into law the “Dr. Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Act,” which authorizes programs to improve mental and behavioral health among healthcare providers.

ORLANDO – Healthcare organizations from payers to providers have been sounding a common refrain in recent years: Provide the right care at the right place at the right time. Various hospital-at-home programs have popped up in response to this ethos, an…

ORLANDO – Healthcare has undergone a number of policy and technology shifts in recent years, and at the intersection of these changes is Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, or FHIR. It’s a standard that describes data formats and an API for exc…

ORLANDO – More than 1.5 million Medicare beneficiaries were enrolled in hospice care for at least one day during 2018, a 17% jump in about four years. While hospice care is useful and compassionate, especially when focusing on quality of life for termi…

ORLANDO – Even before COVID-19 made the business of healthcare a nightmare for countless physicians and clinicians, burnout was a prevalent issue. And even the slow, still-ongoing emergence into normalcy hasn’t been enough to ease this trend: Clerical …

The performance of Medicare Accountable care organizations has been mixed. When ACOs were first launched, the goal was to save costs and improve quality, with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services offering two different models with two differe…

ORLANDO – It’s been less than a year since the Department of Health and Human Services implemented a new measure to the Protect Patient Health Information objective requiring eligible hospitals and critical access hospitals to complete an annual assess…

ORLANDO – Value-based care will continue to accelerate, and the best way forward for health systems, from both a financial and clinical quality standpoint, is to have a clear transition plan and a robust population health framework.