Richard Pizzi
In these days of increasing bad debt, depleted cash-on-hand and narrow margins, health systems need to streamline their revenue cycle operations, and that often means outsourcing services or automating processes that were previously done by hand.
St. Mary’s Hospital in Passaic, N.J., has completed a reorganization plan and appears to be on it’s way out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy status.
State Medicaid programs around the country continue to take the brunt of legislative budget cuts in early 2010, and hospitals are feeling the heat.
In late February, we learned from Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services that the U.S. not-for-profit healthcare sector had begun to stabilize. Or at least it had stabilized enough so that S&P expects its healthcare ratings and outlooks won’t be tanking in 2010.
The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission has recommended that Congress give hospitals a fiscal year 2011 payment update equal to the rate of change in the market basket index, currently projected at 2.4 percent, concurrent with implementation of a pay-for-performance program.
The growing market power of hospitals and physicians to negotiate higher payment rates has gone largely unexamined, according to a study by the Center for Studying Health System Change.
Despite the increasing clout of HMOs in the 1990s, hospitals maintained a dominant position in determining healthcare pricing decisions, according to a new study.
Mountain States Health Alliance, a 15-hospital health system in eastern Tennessee, is reaching across state lines to fund a nursing education program in Virginia, with the hope that local residents will ultimately fill nursing positions.
The CHRISTUS Santa Rosa Health System, a five-hospital health system based in San Antonio, Texas, is implementing what it calls a “unique” revenue cycle management model.
Hospital inpatient and outpatient services encountered inflation rates around 8 percent in the past 12 months, which is 2 percent higher compared to the previous year, according to a new report.