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Hospitals get back $7B in Medicare reimbursements
Hospital advocates have managed to tame a substantial round of planned cutbacks in Medicare reimbursements. Originally, 4.8 percent cuts in the Medicare inpatient prospective payment reimbursement... Read more...
Hospitals screen incoming patients for MRSA
Hospitals are continuing their war against methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), battling a worrisome new trend in which patients actually enter the hospital with a "community strain" version of the bug rather than picking it up as an inpatient. The efforts supplement newly-aggressive programs fighting in-house MRSA infections. A growing number of hospitals are making big-bucks investments in new "search and destroy" programs hoping to nip MRSA in the bud. Hospitals …
... Read more...NY overpays providers by $26M
A new audit by the New York Department of Health has found that the state's Medicaid program overpaid providers by almost $26 million over a five year period. The problems occurred, auditors found, because controls within the Department's electronic claims processing system were not being used, and what's more, that the clinics weren't following the state's Medicaid billing guidelines. The payments, which took place from 2001 through 2006, went to clinic services for hospitalized Medicaid …
... Read more...Tenet settles SEC suit for $10M
Tenet Healthcare has agreed to pay $10 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle a suit alleging Medicare fraud. The SEC filed suit in 2002 against Tenet and four of its former officers, contending that the hospital operator had deliberately miscoded Medicare inpatient and outpatient charges as outliers. Coming up with the $10 million should be no problem for Tenet, which says that it has already set aside enough money to cover the settlement.The SEC agreement is …
... Read more...SPOTLIGHT: Building a case for case management
Hospital case management was introduced to control costs by managing resources appropriately. It didn't work, however, as case management nurses were quickly relegated to chart review tasks rather than hands-on care management. However, there is still a solid business case to be made for correctly-designed case management programs, particularly if the manager works with patients across an entire episode of care rather than just during their inpatient stay, these authors suggest. Article
MA seeks hospital infection disclosure
After studying the problem at length, officials with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) are planning to ask the state's hospitals to publicly disclose their inpatient infection rates. To kick off the effort, the state is spending $1 million researching the scope of the problem, hiring a panel of 50 experts to survey the state's hospitals as to their current infection rates and prevention strategies. By June the team, which has surveyed 73 hospitals so far, expects to …
... Read more...LA hospital investigated for patient dumping
The Los Angeles city attorney's office has begun investigating whether staff from the city's Hollywood Presbyterian hospital dumped a paraplegic man in a gutter in front of a local mission. Security cameras recorded workers from the hospital arriving, wheeling the man on a gurney into the courtyard, then, after being challenged by the mission's security guards regarding the paraplegic's care, being wheeled back into the ambulance. Later, however, the man was found in a skid row gutter. …
... Read more...ALSO NOTED: U.K. runs out of beds; Ohio seeks Israeli technology; and much more...
> A severe bed shortage in the National Health Services is forcing British hospitals to cut corners to accommodate "casualty" patients. Report
> State officials and business leaders in Ohio are hosting a mission of 15 to 20 health and medical IT companies from Israel next week. Release
> New inpatient tower opens at USC University …
... Read more...IHI launches hospital injury reduction effort
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) is launching a new campaign aimed at preventing 5 million incidents of medical harm within U.S. hospitals during the next 24 months. The initiative, which is sponsored largely by America's Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans, follows on a previous effort known as the 100,000 Lives Campaign, under which 3,100 hospitals reduced inpatient deaths by about 122,000 in 18 …
... Read more...Better Medicare ratings don't mean fewer deaths
In using quality ratings, patients and health purchasers may feel they're getting some assurance that they can predict the outcome of their care. Well, in this case, apparently they can't--at least not yet. According to new research, there seems to be little difference in hospital death rates for three common conditions (heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia) regardless of how the hospitals rank on Medicare hospital performance measures. The study, by the University of Pennsylvania's …
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