Capital Finance
The number and value of physician medical group transactions has been on the rise over the last five years, and as healthcare networks become the norm under pressure from healthcare reform, the conditions will remain ripe for a continuation of that trend.
Recently, Global Healthcare Exchange (GHX) announced the winners of its 13th annual GHXcellence Awards, which honor supply chain leaders who have achieved significant savings and efficiencies. Two of the winners shared their success stories with Healthcare Finance News.
Every hospital supply chain administrator fantasizes of an efficient way to create transparency in supply expense reporting and find cost savings. Administrators at Arizona's Banner Health made their fantasy a reality, creating a supply chain blue book.
The Affordable Care Act has brought about financial uncertainty for many health systems, which makes it all the more important for those negotiating contracts with unions to move those negotiations out of the hands of the human resources department and into teams created for the purpose.
The outlook for not-for-profit hospital credit ratings remains poor for the foreseeable future, according to an executive with Moody’s Investor's Service who spoke this week at the 2013 HFMA National Institute.
As most everyone in the healthcare industry knows, mergers, acquisitions and partnerships have been increasing, but the reasons behind this and the forms these partnerships take, are changing.
For many small, community stand-alone health systems across the country, eventually merging with another larger healthcare organization remains a distinct possibility. Until that day arrives though -- if it does at all -- these organizations must continue to focus their efforts on meeting the quality care needs of the local community.
Summa Health System and Catholic Health Partners are on the road to becoming accountable care organizations, and they're sharing what they've learned with attendees of the Healthcare Financial Management Association's ANI 2013 conference taking place next week in Orlando, Fla.
Not-for-profit hospitals are feeling the pinch as their pension plans take a bigger bite out of their budget. The culprit, according to a recent Standard and Poor's report, is low discount rates, which have eroded the funding status of defined benefit (DB) plans in 2012.
It may not be quite at epidemic levels, but merger mania has definitely taken hold in the healthcare field, and most certainly in New England.
One of the latest examples is the proposed partnership of Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, the Lahey Clinic of Burlington, Mass., and Atrius Health, a Newton, Mass.-based consortium of Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates. Atrius Health is the largest physician organization in Massachusetts, with 1,000 physician members.