Accounting & Financial Management

Fee-for-service methodologies, especially relative-value units (RVUs), keep creeping back into alternative payment models like capitation. Maybe we should take the hint and adapt RVUs to the new environment rather than throwing them out the window.

Hanging above physicians like the mythical sword of Damocles, the sustainable growth rate (SGR) provision threatens to impose a 24.4 percent decrease to the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule on Jan. 1, 2014.

Reference pricing is a great cost-saving idea and I'd like to see more of it. But it’s a pretty poor argument for the superiority of the free market in healthcare.

As the healthcare industry transforms, consolidation, mergers and acquisitions and creative partnerships continue.

Community Health Systems reported a sharp drop in earnings for the third quarter and lowered its full-year earnings outlook on the challenging environment for healthcare providers and sliding patient volume.

The Affordable Care Act cuts Medicare price growth. But if hospitals respond by increasing the amount of care provided, the potential cost savings from price restraint may be lost.

Overall U.S. healthcare prices remained relatively unchanged from August to September 2013, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Hospital emergency departments may begin receiving "considerably more" reimbursement once the Affordable Care Act is fully implemented, a new study claims, pleasing hospital CFOs as well as ER docs.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is currently assessing the impact of the partial government shutdown on the 2014 Medicare fee for service payment regulations, and intends to issue the final rules on or before November 27, 2013.

Eliminating a traditional management exercise as old as the budget may seem risky to hospital CFOs, but many businesses have done just that. Some say using a 19th-century tool to manage a 21st-century organization makes little sense.