Finance, Revenue Cycle

The industry is a little over a year away from the transition to ICD-10. While that may seem like a long time, Cindy Hegner, certified coder and approved ICD-10 trainer, says that patient care organizations cannot be too prepared. Hegner also offers her thoughts on the industry's readiness, and challenges medical practices will face in the upcoming months.

Strong relationships with physicians, particularly those that are long standing, are likely to increase patients' openness to talk about health care costs when decisions are being made about their treatment options, according to a study from the National Institutes of Health. Rushed visits with insufficient time to talk about important issues can undermine efforts to bring sensitive topics like costs into the doctor-patient relationship and can be counter-productive. The work appears online in the Journal of General Medicine.

Healthcare providers are actively reducing costs in reaction to changes brought by healthcare reform, according to a survey from Provista, an Irving, Tx.-based supply chain improvement company.

With all of the knowledge gained at last week’s Healthcare Financial Management Association's (HFMA) annual conference in Orlando, Fla., there was one message conveyed that helped put it all together: finance professionals, particularly CFOs, need to lead the way towards the new healthcare.

Emergency physicians are key decision makers for nearly half of all hospital admissions, highlighting a critical role they can play in reducing health care costs, according to a new report from the RAND Corporation. The report recommends that hospital administrators, policymakers, payers and federal research agencies recognize the current reality in emergency department operations and the role they play in coordinating care for millions of patients.