Revenue Cycle Management

The American Association of Homecare says the competitive bidding process initiated for Medicare patients at the start of 2011 is not working.

CMS has apparently determined that facilities with DRG payments in excess of $100 million during the last fiscal year have the ability to address a larger number of RAC additional documentation requests.

The TriZetto Group, Inc., announced Tuesday that it has signed an agreement to acquire privately held Gateway EDI, a St. Louis-based healthcare revenue cycle management (RCM) company. Officials said the combination of the companies' platforms will benefit both payers and providers by delivering integrated end-to-end real-time payment information.

Craneware, Inc., a provider of automated revenue integrity solutions for the U.S. healthcare market, has acquired Nashville-based ClaimTrust, Inc., a Software-as-a-Service revenue cycle technology vendor.

Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford in Palo Alto, Calif., has contracted with MD Ranger, a Burlingame, Calif.-based benchmarks and service data company.

In Pennsylvania, a healthcare system is using a game to help administrators learn how to respond to and solve staffing and employee issues. In Montana, a medical center is using an online system to allow physicians and nurses to bid for and arrange their own work schedules. Welcome to staffing and scheduling in the 21st Century.

Chris Charland is the senior director of capital equipment at Novation. He spoke recently with Healthcare Finance News editor Richard Pizzi about healthcare supply chain management trends to expect in 2011.

New organization would insure 1.8 million

In early January, Blue Shield of California proposed rate hikes for nearly 200,000 individual policy holders that would see some members' premiums jump as much as 59 percent on March 1.

The California-based Integrated Healthcare Association has been awarded a three-year, $2.9 million grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.