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Physician practices have the lowest revenue growth in the healthcare industry. When every dollar counts, anything from a lost referral to a bad online review can impact profitability. Here are some common revenue leaks and tips on plugging them.
While reducing reliance on expensive inpatient care is a sensible goal for hospitals, the transition away from a bricks-and-mortar, fee-for-service model is creating tremendous pressures on chief financial officers.
The Cleveland Clinic and University of Texas Health are using the nation's first mobile stroke units to treat stroke patients sooner, and both show promise in preserving patients' quality of life and saving a great deal of money.
The medical tourism industry must respond to the problems found in surrogacy tourism. The first is the need for medical tourism companies, brokers, clinics and even hospitals to hold patient funds in escrow. Abuse of patient trust by misappropriating funds should no longer be an issue.
For those in the medical tourism industry, the issue of "surrogacy tourism" or commercial surrogacy is not an issue of morality. Whatever one believes, there is a need for surrogacy services and people will take chances with the law in order to have children.
Seismic changes altering the healthcare industry are creating an increasing number of compliance requirements for hospitals and health systems to meet. This means a larger role for an organization's chief compliance officer.
The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is exporting its knowledge and management services around the world, to countries like China and Lithuania that are expanding healthcare for emerging middle class populations.
The emergence of digital and retail health is a clarion call for hospitals and medical practices to innovate and improve the patient experience. However, providers could lose patients to retail companies if the seeds sown by the likes of CVS, Walgreens and Walmart take root.
When a healthcare provider's data resides on someone else's servers, plenty can go wrong. And HIPAA isn't necessarily the worst of it. Experts offer contracting advice to help head off financial and legal disputes between vendors and providers.
It wasn't all that long ago that most surgeries, and many medical and diagnostic procedures, required patients to plan for an inpatient hospital stay. But times have changed.