AHIP has appointed MIke Tuffin its next president and CEO. Tuffin will officially take the helm of the healthcare payer trade organization effective January 8. He succeeds AHIP CEO Matt Eyles, who decided to step down this year.  Julie Simon Miller, AHIP’s general counsel, has served as interim CEO since September.

Cigna and Humana have reportedly ended their talks to merge after failing to agree on a price, according to Reuters.

Patient advocacy groups have sent a letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services criticizing UnitedHealthcare’s Medicare Advantage marketing, asking the agency to investigate potentially misleading advertising tactics.

The White House has signaled its intent to address the potentially negative and problematic aspects of corporate ownership in healthcare, with a focus on drug pricing, transparency and anticompetitive behavior.

Benefits for patients include faster access, no delay in finding an available mental health provider and better coverage options, says Dr. Nele Jessel, chief medical officer of athenahealth.  

Physicians preferred the answers to medical questions provided by Google’s Med-PaLM to those written by other physicians, says Dr. Michael Howell, the company’s chief clinical officer. He discussed the experimentation with and evolution of the medically tuned LLM.  

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has reached a settlement with Lafourche Medical Group, a Louisiana medical group specializing in emergency medicine, occupational medicine and laboratory testing. The settlement resolves an investigation following a phishing attack that affected the electronic protected health information of about 34,862 people.

A bill introduced in the House would avert a pending 3.37% physician pay cut to Medicare payments, according to the American Medical Association.

CVS Health has announced a new branded name for its health services segment. CVS Healthspire includes Caremark, Cordavis, Oak Street Health, Signify Health and MinuteClinic. The groups within CVS Healthspire will continue to focus on integration across the company.

Multiple chronic conditions, ranging from diabetes to depression, are becoming more common, according to the United Health Foundation, the philanthropic arm of UnitedHealth Group. Many chronic conditions are at the highest levels ever recorded in the annual report.