Another honor for magazine

The expose revealed that hospitals have been losing money on patient care for 25 consecutive years. Yet, hospitals have survived, with many thriving solely because of alternative sources of revenue, Carlson wrote. Last year, Carlson received the NIHCM Foundation's prestigious award for his Nov. 30, 2009 cover story, “Trauma to the system.”

That piece detailed efforts by some hospitals to combat violent crime in their communities before more victims show up in their emergency rooms. Please join us in congratulating Carlson and Modern Healthcare for this honor. We write for readers, not for awards, but we welcome the external recognition as external validation of our efforts. The NIHCM Foundation will honor Carlson and Modern Healthcare at a banquet May 16 in Washington.

If you want to know how you can make money from patient care, be sure to register for our complimentary April 27 editorial webcast on benchmarking the revenue cycle. Melanie Evans, Modern Healthcare's New York bureau chief and finance reporter, will lead a discussion on the experiences of healthcare organizations in their revenue-cycle benchmarking efforts. Evans' two guests will be Vivian Boyd, vice president of revenue cycle at Iowa Health System in Des Moines, Iowa, and Sheila Kuenzle, network vice president of revenue cycle at SSM Health Care in St. Louis. The webcast is sponsored by Craneware.* To register, please go to modernhealthcare.com/webcasts. You have two days left, and participation is limited to the first 1,000 people to log in to the webcast.

Speaking of money, the transparency of clinical and financial performance made it to the second round of our Big Impact Tournament, where you, the reader, decide what person, innovation, organization or event had the biggest impact on the healthcare system in the past 35 years. The tournament is part of our monthslong celebration of Modern Healthcare's 35th anniversary. Clinical and financial performance transparency, the No. 3 seed in the innovations region, defeated No. 14 seed, group purchasing and supply chain management, in the first round to face telemedicine, the No. 11 seed, in the second round. Telemedicine upset No. 6 bundled payments to advance to the second round. Other first-round winners include President Barack Obama, who faces Dr. Jack Kevorkian in the second round, and the creation of Medicare's prospective payment system, which plays the Institute of Medicine's To Err is Human report for the right to play in round three, starting May 2. To play, visit ModernHealthcare.com/35.

One last deadline, and that's April 29. That's the last day to submit your entry for our third annual IT Case Study Contest. Tell us how your IT project improved patient care and qualified for federal subsidies under the meaningful-use provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. To enter, visit visit modernhealthcare.com/itcasestudy. The IT provisions of the ARRA are pitted against the comparative-effectiveness provisions of the ARRA in the second round of the Big Impact Tournament. Should be a good game.

*Per editorial policy, sponsors are not involved in the development, production or publication of editorial content.