Quality and Safety
Medicare officials have allowed patients at dozens of hospitals participating in pilot projects across the country to be exempted from the controversial requirement that limits nursing home coverage to seniors admitted to a hospital for at least three days.
Hospitals are increasingly making reducing hospital-acquired infections and readmissions a priority -- and saving millions of dollars in the process -- but there are still gaps to be filled.
Cancer treatment costs are among the highest in the healthcare industry. Insurer UnitedHealthcare created a pilot in an attempt to lower costs that has yielded some promising, though somewhat mixed results.
Medicare regulators are updating hospital outpatient and ambulatory surgery center payments for next year, and also outlining a potential remedy to private Medicare overpayments.
A patient-centered medical home program with a physician-owned, multispecialty group has been so promising that Aetna is extending the arrangement.
When a car rolls off an assembly line, the automaker knows exactly what parts, labor and facilities cost. Not so in healthcare, and now some health executives are trying to change that.
While the United States pays the most for healthcare among all other developed nations, it also ranks last when it comes to the quality of care received compared to 10 other western, industrialized nations.
A quarter of the nation's hospitals in October will receive lower Medicare payments because their rates of patient complications are higher than their peers. Here is an explanation of the three measures Medicare is using to calculate the hospital-acquired conditions scores.
Healthcare finance professionals must better understand how value is delivered by frontline providers, and simultaneously offer providers business insight, said an expert on nursing management today at the HFMA ANI 2014 conference.
A quarter of the nation's hospitals, those with the worst rates of hospital-acquired conditions, will lose 1 percent of every Medicare payment for a year starting in October. The sanctions, estimated to total $330 million over a year, kick in at a time when most infections measured in hospitals are on the decline, but still too common.