Quality and Safety
As 2014 winds down, we've taken a look back at some of the biggest stories in healthcare finance in the past year. See what you may have missed.
Our job in healthcare is to identify the at-risk populations we encounter, and the information, tools, and behaviors we need to mobilize to seal the cracks and effectively transfer patient information among the members of the patient's healthcare team.
The number of accountable care organizations in Medicare's Shared Savings Program will grow by 89 in January 2015, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid said this week, boosting the total participants to 405. Medicare ACOs will now serve more than 7.2 million patients.
If we are to promote the safe and timely transfer of patients from one level of care to another or from one type of setting to another, we must broaden our view of the who, what, and how involved in achieving effective transitions of care.
There are two ways of thinking about, and therefore measuring, the rate of hospital readmissions, and they often lead to quite different results and quite different decisions on Medicare penalties.
UnitedHealthcare and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center are piloting an episode of care, or bundled, payment model for patients being treated with head and neck cancers, a collaboration they describe as among the first to use bundled payments in a large, comprehensive oncology center.
Poverty continues to have an effect on repeated hospitalizations -- a situation that threatens to cost health systems in higher Medicare readmissions penalties if post-discharge plans are not established.
More than 50 accountable care organizations across the United States took in millions in incentive payments in 2014 after exceeding savings benchmarks set by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Hundreds of community health centers will receive more than $36 million from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for achievements in quality of care or the use of electronic health records.
Nearly 9 percent of the births covered by Medicaid -- or about 160,000 each year -- were elective deliveries before 39 weeks of gestation, which lead to worse health outcomes for mothers and children and higher costs, according to a study published Monday.