inpatient

A new study suggests that the federal government's formula for calculating its share of Medicaid matching funds has a significant flaw that undermines the program. Because Medicaid upper payment limit matching funds for hospitals are based on fee-for-service payments, rather than capitated arrangements, states paying capitations can lose millions in upper payment limit funds, according to a study by The Lewin Group. The report, which was funded by the Medicaid Health  Plains of …

> Pheonix, AZ-based Maricopa Medical Center is planning a $500 million hospital to replace its currently outdated 621-bed facility. Administrators say that the design of the old building is in need of change because it offers patients little privacy as well as several safety concerns. The hospital industry is in the midst of an ongoing building boom--they're projected to spend $20 billion on construction …

CMS announced that it is rolling out the Physician-Hospital Collaboration Demonstration (PHCD), a three-year program designed to gauge whether hospitals can improve outcomes without raising costs, if they reward doctors for providing better care. Under the program, "the hospital would be paid its usual inpatient rate for the patient's care, but would pay to the physician a portion of the savings resulting from quality improvement and efficiency initiatives taken by the physician." …

At Hospital Impact, healthcare consultant Craig Allan Ahrens notes that a hospital's service portfolio can greatly impact a number of factors. "Choices around a service portfolio will influence whether you are more likely to get Medicare versus private pay patients, medical versus procedural patients, inpatient versus outpatient patients, etc." But advising what service mix a hospital should use creates a moral dilemma for Ahrens. Blog

A new Ohio law mandates that hospitals post data on performance of 100 common procedures and report the average cost of 60 common outpatient procedures. Data is already available on 100 inpatient procedures. The information will be available on a Web site by May 2007. Yesterday we reported on the complexities of healthcare pricing and how transparency is lagging behind the adoption of CDHPs. Ohio's expanded reporting is a step in the …

The Government Accountability Office issued two hospital-related reports Friday. The first praises proposed changes in Medicare reimbursement for hospitals. The second says large not-for-profit hospital systems are doing better at overseeing executive compensation. CMS is considering adjusting inpatient DRG payments using national average cost-to-charge ratios, rather than basing them strictly on cost data as is done for outpatient payments, a strategy that the GAO says makes sense. CMS's …

Utah-based healthcare IT ratings group KLAS has handed its number one vendor ranking to Unibased Systems Architecture (USA). The research group released its annual year end listing of the top twenty vendors. The rating puts the tiny company ahead of heavyweights like Cerner, Epic and Misys. USA was ranked top in Enterprise Scheduling and OR Management. As usual, Epic won inpatient charting and EMR for physician groups of 25 and over . The KLAS ratings' impact on the healthcare IT vendor …

Hospitals in California said they are willing to obey a new state law which requires them to publish lists of their 25 most common inpatient and outpatient procedures. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger officially signed Assembly Bill 1045 last week. A similar bill passed in 2003 but produced mixed results. Critics say the earlier law wasn't specific enough about the data hospitals are required to publish and the ways in which they are required to publish it. As a result, some hospitals released …

Justice Department officials delivered a subpoena to Johnson & Johnson yesterday, saying they want to know more about the company's marketing of the controversial heart failure drug Natrecor. There are concerns that the drug, which was approved conditionally by the FDA for inpatient use, is now being prescribed widely for outpatients. Some studies have suggested that Natrecor may lead to kidney damage in some cases. That has made Natrecor a topic of much debate in professional …