What not-for-profit hospitals pay their CEOs has little to do with financial performance or quality scores, but the top executives generally make more at hospitals with expensive technology and high marks in patient satisfaction, according to a new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
The researchers drew data on 1,877 CEOs overseeing 2,691 hospitals from the Form 990 their organization submitted to the IRS for the 2009 tax year.
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Nursing unions wanting higher staffing ratios have more ammunition thanks to a new study concluding that increasing nurse staffing levels could help hospitals avoid Medicare penalties for avoidable readmissions.
The study covered readmissions of Medicare patients who suffered heart attacks, heart failure or pneumonia. It appears in the October issue of Health Affairs.
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If Congress manages to get the government restarted and avert the debt ceiling crisis, lawmakers may have just enough time to renew their
10-year tradition of "kicking the can" on finding a replacement for the Medicare sustainable growth-rate payment formula.
During a "Washington Update" session, Jeb Shepard and Jennifer Gasperini of the Medical Group Management Association's government affairs staff told attendees at the association's annual conference in San Diego how legislative and regulatory action and inaction may affect the medical practices they run.
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New research calls into question the validity of using post-operative blood clot rates as a metric of hospital quality. According to a study published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, rates of venous thromboembolism—a term that includes pulmonary embolism and deep vein thrombosis—could be skewed by surveillance bias.
Such bias can occur in hospitals that have more expansive screening criteria for VTE, including the testing of asymptomatic patients, or in hospitals that rely more heavily on imaging for diagnosis, said the authors, who analyzed data from the CMS' Hospital Compare, the American Hospital Association and Medicare claims.
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The advent of recovery auditing in Medicare has led to a sharp increase in administrative appeals by hospitals, creating administrative logjams but not necessarily leading to victories for providers complaining about denied payments.
Between 2008 and 2012, the number of administrative appeals annually involving inpatient hospital care skyrocketed from 46,000 to 284,000, according to a report out today from HHS' Office of the Inspector General.
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The annual Health 2.0 Conference is wrapping up in Santa Clara, Calif., today, and with it come several launches worth noting.
One is the start of a $100,000 developer's challenge, seeking cloud-based, “innovative health applications that will revolutionize the way physicians and hospitals educate patients,” according to the contest sponsors.
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A Medicare test of accountable care in Wisconsin slowed cost growth last year for about 20,000 seniors. That's good news, of course, to economists and policymakers. But for hospitals, the news was not all good because most payers continue to reimburse on a fee-for-service basis rewarding more admissions and more volume of services.
An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association said that for hospitals that participate in Medicare accountable care programs, such as ThedaCare in Appleton, Wis., competing financial incentives can make their ACO efforts counterproductive.
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McDermott
Responding to criticism that Medicare is not paying for enough seniors' skilled-nursing care following serious hospitalizations, Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) has introduced a bill that would eliminate a barrier to rehab care known as the “three-day rule.”
As it stands, the three-day rule says Medicare will not pay for the time that seniors spend in a nursing home recovering from a hospital stay unless they were hospitalized as an inpatient for three days. McDermott's bill, the “Fairness for Beneficiaries Act,” would eliminate the three-day requirement and replace it with a provision that says seniors would need a physician to certify their need for skilled-nursing, regardless of time spent as an inpatient.
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A trade group representing the orthotics and prosthetics industry is accusing the CMS of failing to enforce anti-fraud and abuse laws against unlicensed providers at a time when legitimate providers are coming under fire from increasingly aggressive Medicare recovery auditors.
The American Orthotic and Prosthetic Association—which represents more than 2,000 businesses that manufacture, distribute and supply patients with orthopedic braces and artificial limbs—released the results of a study this week that says the number of Medicare patients receiving the medical equipment from noncertified personnel has not changed significantly even though the rules were tightened in 2000 and 2005.
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The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has joined the entities urging the CMS to publish the Medicare earnings and de-identified clinical data of individual physicians. But the foundation stopped short of calling for widespread public release to any interested party.
In recent years, the CMS has published several datasets for the first time, including average hospital charges for common Medicare treatments and the prescribing patterns of doctors in Medicare's drug-benefit program. Now a ruling this year in a 30-year-old lawsuit is prompting the agency to consider releasing a long-sought dataset that would show how individual doctors care for and are paid to treat patients on Medicare.
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The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has joined the entities urging the CMS to publish the Medicare earnings and de-identified clinical data of individual physicians. But the foundation stopped short of calling for widespread public release to any interested party.
In recent years, the CMS has published several datasets for the first time, including average hospital charges for common Medicare treatments and the prescribing patterns of doctors in Medicare's drug-benefit program. Now a ruling this year in a 30-year-old lawsuit is prompting the agency to consider releasing a long-sought dataset that would show how individual doctors care for and are paid to treat patients on Medicare.
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