John Stanton, Vice President of Consulting at RemitDATA, discusses new advances in health IT as they apply to claims processing and revenue cycle management, touching upon topics such as RAC audits, big data, cloud computing and the role of comparative analytics in billing.

Dan Riskin, MD, co-founder and CEO of big data company Health Fidelity, explains that 80 percent of healthcare information remains unstructured and unused. Big data can be utilized to meet regulatory requirements, he says, but it has to be part of an overall strategy to improve care within a health system. Click through to play the full video.

Among approximately 3 million Medicare patients hospitalized for heart failure, heart attack or pneumonia, readmissions were frequent throughout the 30 days following the hospitalization, and resulted from a wide variety of diagnoses that often differed from the cause of the index hospitalization, according to a study appearing in the January 23/30 issue of JAMA.

Among rescue and recovery workers exposed to the dust, debris and fumes following the World Trade Center terrorist attack, there was an increased incidence of prostate and thyroid cancers and multiple myeloma, although it is not clear how big a factor medical screening and non-WTC risk factors contributed to these increases, according to a study in the Dec. 19 issue of JAMA. The authors did not find a statistically significant increased incidence for all cancer sites combined, and note that the findings on the three cancers that did increase should be viewed with caution for several reasons, including that they were based on a small number of cancers, multiple comparisons and a relatively short follow-up time.