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Female CEOs are doing better than ever on the compensation front, with median pay figured at $15.9 million, 21 percent higher than last year. That compared with median pay for male CEOs of $10.4 million, which was down 0.8 percent from 2013. Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo is at the pinnacle of the top 10 women CEO list, with a salary of $42.1 million. The numbers come from executive compensation benchmarking firm Equilar and the Associated Press. However, there remains a large gap between the number of female CEOs and male CEOs. The study of 340 CEOs included only 17 women. Also, numbers can be tricky. Once they are sliced and diced, the picture comes into better focus. Released along with the list of highest paid women CEOs, was another list – one that ranked highest paid CEOs, regardless of gender. Mayer was the one woman to make that list – at No. 5. As Fast Company pointed out after it crunched the annual paychecks every which way: The top two highest-paid male CEOs make more than all the top-paid female CEOs combined. David Zaslav, the top executive at Discovery Communications, took in $156.1 million in 2014. Leslie Moonves, the CEO of CBS, made $54.4 million. Combined, that's about $210 million. Here are the top 10 women CEOs by compensation: Marissa Mayer: Yahoo, $42.1 million Carol Meyrowitz: TJX Companies, $23.3 million Meg Whitman: Hewlett-Packard, $19.6 million Indra Nooyi: PepsiCo, $19.1 million Phebe Novakovic: General Dynamics, $19 million Virginia Rometty: IBM, $17.9 million Marillyn Hewson: Lockheed Martin, $17.9 million Patricia Woertz: Archer Daniels Midland, $16.3 million Irene Rosenfeld: Mondelez International, $15.9 million Ellen Kullman, DuPont, $13.1 million Other key findings from Equilar: For the first time since 2011, a female executive (Marissa Mayer of Yahoo!) made the list as one of the top 10 highest-paid CEOs with a total compensation of $42.1 million. The four highest paid executives – David Zaslav, Leslie Moonves, Philippe Dauman, and Robert Iger—have all appeared in the top 10 since the study was first published. For CEOs in the current study, median pay increased 0.8 percent between 2013 and 2014 from $10,521,653 to $10,611,031. On average, pay packages in 2014 were composed of 61 percent equity, 36 percent cash and 3 percent other compensation. Female CEOs are outpacing their male colleagues in pay, although they remain vastly outnumbered in the top echelons of American companies. Twitter: @Bernie_HITN Email the writer: bernie.monegain@himssmedia.com

Getting pharmacists involved in patient-centric activities, including being part of clinical care teams, is a little easier thanks to telepharmacy technology. When Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire, needed to optimize its pharmacy workflow with the goal of improving patient care, it turned to PowergridRx, a cloud-based HIPAA–compliant telepharmacy platform from San Francisco-based PipelineRx. Starting in February, Dartmouth-Hitchcock began deploying PowerGridRx in its hospitals across New England. PowerGridRx is a software as a service platform that aggregates, manages and optimizes virtual pharmacy management for health systems. In addition, it differentiates Dartmouth-Hitchcock's telepharmacy network and manages the order verification process for current and future facilities. The interoperable technology platform is designed to improve medication administration visibility between facilities and addresses logistical and budgetary challenges that arise from managing and staffing multiple care settings. [Also: Dartmouth-Hitchcock, Harvard Pilgrim join forces on population health] Sarah Pletcher, MD, medical director and founder, Center for Telehealth at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, said the health system uses PowerGrid Rx as a tool in the delivery of telepharmacy services across wider landscape. "Our customers are the ultimate end user in that regard," Pletcher said. After going live in six hospitals Dartmouth-Hitchcock has processed thousands of patient orders: "We have data that suggests the benefit to the hospitals in that we are allowing them to load-level staffing and optimize their in hospital team sometimes deploying them to more patient care or clinical activities," she said. Pletcher pointed out that for many smaller rural and critical access hospitals, the volumes that they see on weekends for example, aren't enough to rationalize them having an in-house pharmacist. "But we are also finding hospitals recognizing the value of having telepharmacy support for scenarios where they want to allow their pharmacists to be out on the floors helping with patient care," she said. In a cancer infusion suite for instance, Pletcher explained that oftentimes pharmacists are part of clinical team working on projects where they might be involved in an electronic medical record implementation, or working on quality or formulary projects for the hospital. "Any time we can help extend their team to allow them to optimize their in-hospital team, we're happy to be there for them," she said. From a technology perspective, Pletcher noted that there are obstacles associated with integration and with host IT systems and EMRs. She said that with anything involving multiple hospital IT departments and multiple hospital EMRs, there's always a challenge – not just the technology integration, but cultural barriers where hospitals have different levels of comfort for how much bi-directional integration they want with outside software platforms. "Because we offer so many other telemedicine services this is something we are familiar with managing – the telepharmacy is the latest service – we have six or seven other 24/7 telemedicine services to hospitals where we've had to contend with IT or EMR integration. We kind of know to expect and support those conversations." Pletcher said Dartmouth-Hitchcock is expanding its telepharmacy program to more sites and more regions. "We're excited about the opportunity to further integrate our telepharmacy solutions with other clinical services." Industry insiders contend that the demand for PowerGrid Rx-type technology is on the rise for multi-site multi-facility organizations that are growing and want to tie their pharmacy network closer and closer together. "We want to create a platform that enables them to share pharmacy labor and pharmacy resources across their whole organization, opposed to having to staff individually each hospital within their network, this enables them to tie them to together," said Brian Roberts, CEO of PipelineRx. Roberts noted that among the challenges is to work with different and multiple types of IT systems. "Some of our customers have eight to ten different types of IT systems that they work with - we integrate back with their host IT systems and bring it into one platform." The other side, according to Roberts, is that they want a system that can capture policies and procedures for each one of their individual hospitals. So for example, if they were creating a central telepharmacy center they would want that telepharmacist to have information at their fingertips. "Our tool helps consolidate and bring policies and procedures into one software offering," said Roberts who added that because PowerGrid Rx is a cloud-based piece of software – there is no hardware on each individual site. "So we use the power of the Internet to build a private cloud that can manage all that information – manage the information and store the information for the hospitals." Roberts said CIOs like that because it’s a cloud-based piece of software that doesn't require them to have to go and do updates and update hardware; that's all taken care of from the PipelineRx side.

New findings from hospital watchdog the Leapfrog Group shows many hospitals across the country are failing to meet national performance targets for  quality of maternity care. The study comes on the heels of Leapfrog's twice-yearly Hospital Safety Score, which assigns letter grades to hospitals based on their adherence to various safety standards. According to the report, 798 hospitals earned an 'A,' 639 earned a 'B,' 957 earned a 'C,' 1162 earned a 'D' and only 15 earned an 'F,' [See also: Leapfrog out with troubling hospital safety numbers.] When it comes to maternity care, facilities were deficient in a number of different areas, such as the rate of episiotomies. A once-routine incision made in the birth canal during childbirth, it's now recommended only in a very narrow set of cases; Leapfrog's target for all hospitals is to perform the incision in 5 percent or less of all cases. Yet the rates were too high among 68 percent of hospitals. Too many C-sections were also being performed, the data showed. At 60 percent of reporting hospitals, the rates surpassed Leapfrog's target rate of 23.9 percent for all hospitals, and the variation was dramatic -- ranging from as low as 10 percent to as high as 54 percent in one unidentified east coast city. Not all of the findings were dour. Four out of five hospitals meet Leapfrog's target of 5 percent for early elective deliveries, which are medically unnecessary inductions or C-sections performed at 39 weeks. That, the report said, means the facility is taking steps to minimize risks to the mother and child be delivering too soon. [See also: Leapfrog Group: Rate of serious, even fatal, hospital infections still too high.] Additionally, the early elective delivery rate has shrunk dramatically, with the national average at 2.8 percent, compared to the 17 percent reported in 2010. But the study also shows many hospitals don't have adequate experience with high-risk deliveries. Low-weight infants born with complications are more likely to survive if the hospital has an experienced neonatal intensive care unit on-site, yet 78 percent of hospitals performing high-risk deliveries don't meet the Leapfrog standard. "This report underscores the importance of understanding the risks associated with specific delivery choices and of improving the quality of care during birth for the wellbeing of both mothers and their babies," said Kristin Torres Mowat, senior vice president of plan development and data operations at Castlight Health, in a statement.

The workgroup’s research found productivity hiccups in providers’ coding, and clinical documentation alongside positive impacts for payers in the areas of claims validation and data analytics. But isn’t it too early to tell whether the transition really went well? 

OhioMHAS sent clients a postcard inviting them to take part in a satisfaction survey, thereby disclosing that the individuals had received treatment. And it’s not the first time the department has sent such a postcard.

For Vice President Joe Biden, his National Cancer Moonshot Initiative is more than just a government program – it's personal.

The proposal would keep hospitals and clinics private, allow physicians to bill under a fee-for-service model, and be funded by rolling combining current sources of government health spending into a single fund with modest new taxes. 

The platform, developed by Yale School of Medicine researchers and Yale New Haven Health System, is designed to enable patients to both access their records and participate in studies.

As the country celebrates National Women’s Heath Week this week, women at the University of California, San Francisco’s National Center of Excellence in Women’s Health, have double cause to celebrate. It was 20 years ago the center was founded. The founding director, Nancy Milliken, continues to lead the enterprise today. “Women were vulnerable to harm from undertreatment, overtreatment and mistreatment due to the lack of rigorous research on women's unique experience of health and disease,” Milliken said in the May 8 UCSF article. Before launching the center, Milliken was a professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at UCSF. UCSF was designated in 1996 as one of the nation's first six National Centers of Excellence in Women's Health, sponsored by the Office on Women's Health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The quest has always been for health equity. “My dream would be that the need for UCSF National Center of Excellence in Women’s Health would be eliminated because sex and gender approaches to research, clinical care, education are in the DNA of UCSF, and inform health care and policy across our nation and the world,” Milliken said in the UCSF article. The other five National Centers of Excellence in Women’s Health designated by HHS in 1996 are located at: – Allegheny University of the Health Sciences, Philadelphia – Magee-Womens Hospital, Pittsburgh – Ohio State University Medical Center, Columbus, Ohio – University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia – Yale University, New Haven, Conn. Read the article here. Twitter: @Bernie_HITN Email the writer: bernie.monegain@himssmedia.com  

Two new funding initiatives, dubbed High Impact Pilots Standards Exploration Award, will focus on improving care delivery and data sharing.