Accounting & Financial Management
CMS plans to recompete the supplier contracts awarded in Round 2 of the Medicare Durable Medical Equipment, Prosthetics, Orthotics, and Supplies (DMEPOS) Competitive Bidding Program, with new contracts beginning July 2016.
When physicians are uninvolved in how expenses are handled in the larger health system environment, and it does not affect their income, behavior changes and apathy for the operational overhead ensues. Institutions leave themselves open to problems when a physician has no incentive to keep costs low.
Financial models involve a whole series of assumptions about such elements as volume, payer mix and salaries. While a health system may have historical data to work from, putting together projections for a new line of business is more difficult.
Healthcare prices in May 2014 were 1.8 percent higher than in May 2013, well above the 12-month moving average of 1.3 percent, according to a recent brief from the Altarum Institute.
Children's hospitals increasingly face the same market challenges as other hospitals, including a growing pressure to significantly reduce costs. Dan May of Huron Healthcare offers performance improvement suggestions for finance and operations leaders at these facilities.
Health costs will accelerate next year, but changes in how people buy care will help keep them from attaining the speed of several years ago, PricewaterhouseCoopers says in a new report.
Many small, rural hospitals have struggled financially in recent years. But one critical access facility in Nebraska has discovered a means to financial stability and beyond.
As providers continue adjusting to the reimbursement changes wrought by the Affordable Care Act, it appears increasingly likely that hospitals will place more emphasis on collecting payments at the point of service.
The American Hospital Association is asking federal Medicare leaders to stem the practice of using sample hospital audit data to extrapolate overpayments eligible for recovery. The lack of clarity regarding standards for short patient stays has clouded the issue.
States' taxing of Medicaid managed care organizations to raise revenue for state-share Medicaid payments may be illegal, according to the HHS Inspector General. If so, this raises serious questions that could shake up MCO financing models.