Accounting & Financial Management
The former chief financial officer of a now-closed Texas hospital is one step closer to a potential five years in federal prison after pleading guilty to wrongly claiming EHR incentive money.
As more new patients come into the healthcare system, savvy providers are seeing opportunities to develop better relationships with the hope that it will translate to greater bill collection success.
Opportunities still exist within the healthcare supply chain for improvement and greater efficiency of operations. Lately, price alignment strategies appear to be at the forefront as the newest hope for cost containment.
Although CMS paused the RAC audit program in March, hospitals must remain vigilant. The agency has promised a new round of recovery auditor contracts will be awarded before the end of 2014.
Third quarter financial results indicate that Kaiser Permanente, the giant California-based nonprofit health system, continues to gain strength.
Though supply chain professionals are keenly aware of the importance of quality and cost, their clinical counterparts may not be as familiar with an organized movement to link these two components with patient outcomes.
As cost control initiatives take on increasing weight at hospitals and health systems, organizations must focus more intently on stemming the costs of medical device procurement.
Hospitals' struggle for financial sustainability continues and may be getting worse, as CFOs say information technology investments draw more resources than expected and threaten to crowd out other priorities.
Hospitals and health systems want to mitigate their compliance spend as much as possible, as well as reduce the odds of facing large penalties for being out of compliance. The path to lowering the costs of compliance starts with putting appropriate policies and procedures in place -- and getting the right people at the table to make that happen.
It's the rare hospital that has never experienced delays in receiving reimbursement as a result of clinical documentation coding snafus. But hospitals that don't make a serious stab at clinical documentation improvement (CDI) will be poised to take an even harder hit come October 2015, the start date for ICD-10 implementation.