Mary Mosquera

As appropriations are trimmed and payments decline, hospitals in the archipelago state making steep cuts to hold back the losses.

In the first part of our conversation with Money Atwal, who is both CFO and CIO at Hilo Medical Center in Hilo, Hawaii, he told us about how he and his team were digging into hospital operations. In the second half of that conversation, he talks about the intersection of quality, finance and technology.

Money Atwal, who is both CFO and CIO at Hilo Medical Center in Hilo, Hawaii, shares with Healthcare Finance News how his organization is counteracting declining reimbursements and resources.

Some states have found practical success in establishing the Affordable Care Act, but what distinguishes their efforts are their unique fit within each state's distinctive political and business climates.

The Obama Administration recovered a record $4.3 billion last year from fraudsters trying to dupe federal health programs, or those who sought payments to which they were not entitled.

The price of an initial inpatient stay explains almost all of the wide spending variation from hospital to hospital on episodes of care, such as for knee or hip replacements, the National Institute for Health Care Reform has found.

Although highly touted, the patient-centered medical home model failed to lower use of services or total costs and produced little quality improvement over three years, research in the latest Journal of the American Medical Association has found.

The recent delay of the employer mandate for medium-sized businesses will harm not-for-profit hospitals because it postpones increased revenues from expanded coverage of previously uninsured patients and the subsequent reduction in bad debt and charity care it would bring, a Moody's report said.

Identifying an individual's health plan sounds pretty straightforward. Most hospitals have an eligibility system to verify a patient's coverage for a specific set of services from specific insurance companies. But as coverage expands and gets more complex, so do the pressures on hospitals.

Because health system operators reacted quickly to manage payment cuts and lower patient volumes, Moody's Investors Service has upgraded its for-profit hospital outlook to positive from stable.