Reimbursement

The total cost for children’s hospital stays in 2009 was $33.6 billion, or about 9 percent of overall hospital costs, according to a new report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Ten New Hampshire hospitals have filed a federal lawsuit against the state of New Hampshire, seeking to enjoin the state from enacting its fiscal 2012-13 budget.

Health plans are incorporating technologies to help them squeeze out administrative expenses from the premium revenue they bring in to meet medical loss ratio requirements designed to assure transparency and value for consumers' premiums. Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, large insurance companies must not spend more than 15 percent of premium revenue on administration and small insurers 20 percent, beginning this year.

I am very impressed that the federal government is willing to experiment with a variety of types of bundled payment models to determine what will work best and what makes sense for different parts of the country.  This is something new for the federal government and they have not been open to this before. They are reaching out to those in healthcare to essentially tell them what will work and to collect ideas about how exactly to do this. 

Perhaps this is to be taken as a sign that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will not, as some healthcare IT pros no doubt are still hoping, push back the compliance deadline for ICD-10.

Since there is a lot to get straight when it comes to ICD-10, it is expected to find a lot of resources designed to get medical professionals up to speed.

UnitedHealthcare is beginning to experience reduced hospital and emergency room use as a result of payers and providers sharing patient data through health information exchange in its eight patient-centered medical home pilots around the country.

Imagine receiving your credit card bill every month, and the only information you're provided is an amount due and a "pay by" date of 48 hours from now.  The amount due doesn't look too far off from what it was on your last statement, so you shrug and just pay your bill – you can trust your credit card company, right?

On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services implemented a new regulation that requires health insurers to submit rate increase requests exceeding 10 percent to federal and state authorities to determine whether the increases are "reasonable or not."

A $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation will help Indiana University researchers better understand how technologies can help underserved aging adults remain at home.