Financial Systems

Be Prepared: Lessons from an Extended Outage of a Hospital’s EHR System

August 30, 2013     Linda Minghella
article
Having an effective response plan is critical for mitigating the impact of downtime, and your organization has likely put a tremendous amount of thought and care into its contingency plan. But your plan may have an Achilles’ heel that your organization is completely unaware of—a weakness that could leave your organization as poorly prepared as if you had no contingency plan at all. Where are the holes in your plan? Find them by asking a simple question: What is the longest hypothetical outage you have planned for?

Got Your "$546 Saline IV Bag" Defense Prepared Yet? I Didn't Think So.

August 27, 2013     Mark Hagland
blog
When The New York Times runs an article on page 1 of its Sunday Business section, people notice. And that goes double when the headline on the article reads, "How to Charge $546 for Six Liters of Saltwater." The bottom line? The push for transparency will only intensify in the new healthcare.

Hospital Readmissions: A Cause for Concern, But Not As Much As You Might Think

August 15, 2013     Rajiv Leventhal
blog
I wouldn't blame you if you were taken aback by the statistics seen earlier this month regarding hospital readmissions. Medical systems are supposed to be lowering readmissions in an effort to improve clinician accountability and patient safety all while cutting costs, and the statistics have told us that most have failed to do that. But taking a deeper look beyond the numbers will show you that the future is not so grim.

Talking Medical Costs? Trust in Physicians is Key

July 25, 2013     John DeGaspari
news
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.

CIOs Beef Up Their RCM Operations in the Post-Reform World

July 25, 2013     Rajiv Leventhal
article
With a perfect storm of lower Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements and the specter additional budgetary cuts from Congress, even automated RCM systems are not up to snuff. How are hospitals, medical groups and integrated health systems preparing for new models of care delivery and reimbursement?

Competition Lowers Insurance Premiums by Nearly 20 Percent in the Health Insurance Marketplace: HHS Report

July 19, 2013     John DeGaspari
news
A new report released by the Department of Health and Human Services finds premiums in the Health Insurance Marketplace will be nearly 20 percent lower in 2014 than previously expected.

Lifting the Cloud of Secrecy over Healthcare Prices

July 16, 2013     Gabriel Perna
blog
The mystery regarding America's high healthcare prices is increasingly becoming public knowledge. It's not just the CMS releasing hospital outpatient data; it's organizations like Fair Health and a database that has information on 16 billion billed medical and dental services. Forget the snake---this is the year of transparency.

BCBS of Michigan PCMH Program Saves an Estimated $155M in Three Years

July 11, 2013     Rajiv Leventhal
news
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan's patient-centered medical home program, the largest PCMH program in the U.S., saved an estimated $155 million from July 2008 to July 2011 based on calculations made from a recent analysis published in Health Services Research Journal.

UnitedHealthcare to Double ACO Contracts to $50 Billion by 2017

July 11, 2013     Rajiv Leventhal
news
UnitedHealthcare, the Minnetonka, Minn.-based health insurer, has announced that it expects to more than double its number of accountable care health plan contracts in the next five years.

Leveraging Software to Drive Savings in Labor Management

July 2, 2013     Rajiv Leventhal
article
Staffing and scheduling responsibilities for nurse managers present tough day-to-day challenges that involve matching often unpredictable patient demand to the nurse resources needed to care for those patients. One health system has been able to save millions of dollars and improve care by using labor management software.

Aetna and Bon Secours Health System Collaborate on ACO Agreement

June 27, 2013     Rajiv Leventhal
news
Aetna and the 19-hospital Bon Secours Health System, based in Marriottsville, Md., have announced a new accountable care agreement that will support 57,000 fee-for-service Medicare beneficiaries in Kentucky, New York, South Carolina and Virginia.

HFMA/ANI Recap: CFOs Need to Become the Pilots of Healthcare

June 26, 2013     Rajiv Leventhal
blog
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.
Page
of 2Next