Strategic Planning
As healthcare continues the transition to value-based reimbursement models, acute and post-acute care collaboration that benefits both organizations -- financially and clinically -- is the future of patient care.
South Nassau Communities Hospital CFO Mark Bogen spoke with Healthcare Finance News about risk, controlling costs and revenue challenges for his Oceanside, N.Y.-based organization.
At a time when emergency care is increasingly viewed as inconvenient, overcrowded and overpriced, and possibly losing ground to urgent care clinics, some health systems are trying to make their ERs a place where people actually want to go and spend their time and money.
Catholic Health Initiatives, one of the nation's largest health systems, is keeping its eye on the future by launching a new health brand that will compete with established health insurers.
If we can identify the "underlying path" of health spending, we can do a better job of predicting the future from a noisy history. This underlying path can also serve as the curve to be monitored for evidence of any "bend."
When physicians are uninvolved in how expenses are handled in the larger health system environment, and it does not affect their income, behavior changes and apathy for the operational overhead ensues. Institutions leave themselves open to problems when a physician has no incentive to keep costs low.
Financial models involve a whole series of assumptions about such elements as volume, payer mix and salaries. While a health system may have historical data to work from, putting together projections for a new line of business is more difficult.
If we don't fundamentally change the way we pay for healthcare, we won't change the economic principles that continue to drive the rapid growth in healthcare spending. Let's pay physicians and hospitals based on the health problems their patients have.
Healthcare prices in May 2014 were 1.8 percent higher than in May 2013, well above the 12-month moving average of 1.3 percent, according to a recent brief from the Altarum Institute.
The Affordable Care Act included a number of delivery system reforms, such as ACOs, bundled payments, and workforce provisions to strengthen foundations in primary care. Unfortunately, a focused effort on payments for specialists was not included.