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Here's The Latest in Health Care:

•  On Thursday, the House passed the $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill that would fund the government through the end of September. The Department of Health and Human Services will be getting a considerable increase in the billions. The budget also  includes a large amount of funding for the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs to boost interoperability.  Read More

•  Americans living in rural areas struggle with access to care. Expansion of programs providing emergency air medical services are limited by cost but a bill introduced last summer hopes to improve access to air ambulance services by updating Medicare's currently minuscule reimbursement rates.  Read More

•  Recently, Amazon announced its entry into the health care space. Its early efforts are dedicated to selling medical supplies such as gloves, syringes, and other health care items to various types of providers.  Read More

•  Social media is becoming a platform for patients to connect online and share reactions to drug treatments. Sometimes, clinical trials can miss side effects and collecting data about a drug from insurance claims and health records can take a long time. So, rather than being faced with lag time, companies are often sifting through the internet and social media for patient reports of side effects as a tempting method of collecting data. But experts warn of drawbacks to this approach.  Read More

Each Friday, Signor Goat reports the latest from the week in health care. Check back next Friday for your dose of our little medical corner of health care news. Brought to you by pMD, innovators in charge capture software.

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