The White House said that it would veto legislation meant to reverse a pending double-digit physician pay cut if lawmakers use the Medicare Advantage program to offset the bill’s costs, according to a letter signed by HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt. In...
Hospital executives say a new online hospital ranking tool launched by Consumer Reports last week could increase public awareness of quality information.
The Governance Institute is renewing attention among hospital trustees on hospital finance, recommending that hospital boards set the performance bar high with a highly disciplined and ongoing strategic, financial and capital planning process.
The May 23 implementation of a requirement that a National Provider Identifier be used for billing claims resulted in a big jump in claims rejections on that day and continued for federal payers into last week, according to industry executives. The...
In much of the country, the Rio Grande is a symbol of the national debate on immigration. In Albuquerque—at least in healthcare circles—the river is about to become a symbol of the competition between the three hospital providers in town.
If a hospital’s physicians, nurses and other clinical staffers save money by preventing patients from developing hospital-acquired conditions, they should be rewarded for those efforts, according to the theory behind a new gainsharing model...
When the subject of potentially adding an electronic prescribing mandate to pending Medicare legislation arose on Capitol Hill late last month, a chorus of protests rose up among physician groups. One group that didn’t join in is the American...
Humana senior executive Jonathan Lord was appointed recently to the board of disease-management device company DexCom, and is expected to receive a package of cash, stock and options worth more than $330,000 during his three-year...
The American Academy of Family Physicians jumped into the consulting business with the conversion of a subsidiary into a for-profit company offering consulting services to help practices and health systems adopt the patient-centered medical home...
Obesity, asthma, food allergies, behavioral disorders, vision deficiencies and prescription-medication abuse are just some of the chronic health problems that children face today, making the need for school nurses in America stronger than...
Few would question the financial importance of recruiting physicians to rural hospitals. David Bachman is trying to put a dollar figure on that importance, while accounting regulations are making clear what the cost is, too.
If you’re searching for the nexus of clinical care and financial performance, you’ve come to the right place. That’s especially true if you don’t want to lose $23,772. That’s the projected average annual loss per hospital starting Oct. 1, when...
Once again, Thomson 100 Top Hospitals: National Benchmarks for Success winners show meaningful differences vs. peers in research performed for Modern Healthcare’s annual 100 Top Hospitals supplement. This time the research shows that the 100...
It’s a classic Catch-22. Hospital coding specialists must rely only on doctor’s notes to determine if a medical condition was present at the time a Medicare patient is admitted to the hospital. But it is often nurses—not doctors—who document that...
What will be the financial impact of Medicare’s new policy to essentially stop paying the treatment costs of preventable medical complications? Just think about a pipe leak that begins with a trickle of water that, if ignored, grows into a...
When it comes down to performance, what separates the country’s top hospitals from average performers could be their compulsive behavior around quality initiatives, data collection and analysis.
We may be inching toward the first federal mandate for information technology. Even Republicans and their close allies in organized medicine, who usually say regulation is the enemy of the good, are backing the stiff arm of the law to get more...
We in healthcare are all too familiar with “silent killers,” those conditions or diseases that can devastate a body while producing vague symptoms or none at all. For example, hypertension taxes the heart and can damage the kidneys without any...
As someone conducting research on diversity in healthcare, the cover story on the Top 25 Minority Executives in Healthcare naturally caught my interest (“Sustainable diversity,” April 7, p. 6). With the changing demographics of our nation—the U.S.
Good primary care produces better outcomes at lower costs. Yet in spite of research affirming the value of primary care, its foundation is crumbling: Fewer physicians are choosing primary-care residencies, reimbursement remains flat, and patient...
Peter Urbanowicz, former general counsel and secretary for Tenet Healthcare Corp., was hired as a senior adviser to the healthcare industry group of Alvarez & Marsal, a management turnaround firm. Urbanowicz, 44, joined Tenet in December...
Ever wonder how fictional hospitals on TV medical dramas such as “House” and “ER” are able to get their hands on the latest MRI machine long before your real-life facility has decided whether it can afford the new technology? Well, their presence...
