Operations

Just because it's hard to achieve a payer mix that better supports a health system's bottom line, it's not impossible.

Consultants hired by the health system that owns Nantucket Cottage Hospital in Massachusetts made several errors that led to lower wages being reported to Medicare for the hospital, which could potentially lead to a $160 million drop in federal Medicare payments over the next fiscal year for facilities across the state.

Gundersen Health CEO Scott Rathgaber and CFO Dara Bartels have called a Health Affairs study published this week that dubbed Gundersen Lutheran Medical Center the most profitable hospital in the United States misleading and "simply not true."

While not every hospital may be as analytically-advanced, many of the lessons learned at UMMC can be applicable even to smaller hospitals looking to make the most of their data projects.

According to a new study, shortages of many drugs that are essential in emergency care have increased in both number and duration in recent years even as shortages for drugs for non-acute or chronic care have eased somewhat.

Major for-profit hospital chain Universal Health Services on Tuesday announced plans to buy out a minority interest in six of its Las Vegas acute care hospitals currently held by a third party.

The findings are based on Medicare cost reports from fiscal year 2013, analyzing almost 3,000 acute-care hospitals. About 60 percent were nonprofit, while one in four were for-profit. The rest were public, or government-owned.

Community Health Systems' long-awaited spin-off of its rural health business into Quorum Health Corp. wrapped up on Friday. Quorum is now an independent public company, trading under the QHC ticker symbol on the New York Stock Exchange.

A recent survey from the market research firm has found that that 87 percent of financially struggling hospitals now regret changing their EHR systems due to higher than expected costs, layoffs, declining inpatient revenues, disenfranchised clinicians and doubts over the benefits of switching systems.

Between January 2010 and July 2015, the analysis found, inspectors identified 3,016 home health agencies -- nearly a quarter of all those examined by Medicare -- that had inadequately reviewed or tracked medications for new patients. In some cases, nurses failed to realize that patients were taking potentially dangerous combinations of drugs, risking abnormal heart rhythms, bleeding, kidney damage and seizures.