-
Hospitals wishing to protect themselves from EMTALA-related complaints and the scrutiny follows are well advised to embrace the growing trend toward bedside registration, suggests Peggy Nakamura, RN, MBA, JD, assistant vice president, chief risk officer and associate counsel for Sacramento, CA-based Adventist Health.
-
The California Healthcare Association (CHA) has adopted a new set of voluntary guidelines on financial aid, charity care, and discount payments for its member hospitals, including a recommendation that hospitals provide financial assistance for patients at or below 300% of the poverty level.
-
Recent guidance from the Department of Health and Human Services recognizes that a good-faith determination of financial need may vary depending on the individual patients circumstances and that hospitals should have flexibility to take into account relevant variables.
-
Youve brought in safer needle devices and reduced your needlesticks. Do you declare success? What more should you do?
-
When the National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently became the target of intense public criticism and scrutiny over potential conflicts of interest (COI) among NIH directors and staff and clinical trials, it became apparent to the research world that this is an issue that could be a problem for any institution. The best prevention strategy is to be proactive by having policies, procedures, and possibly a special committee that reviews COIs, experts say.
-
When it came to streamlining the way patients, referring physicians, and other interested parties contact Geisinger Health System in Danville, PA, for various access-related services, it seems that one good idea led to another.
-
If the front end would just get it right when the patient first comes in . . . goes the refrain from billers, or the CFO, or some other party focused on putting the blame for unreimbursed care at the feet of the access department. But when a substantial number of patients walk in without insurance coverage at the time of care or are emergency patients who dont have their insurance information with them, its not quite that simple.
-
Its easy to make the case that many administrative transactions health organizations routinely handle in-house can be done better, faster, and more cost-effectively by outside vendors. Yet less than 1% of health organizations outsource all of their revenue cycle processes.
-
Access departments are playing with fire if they dont consistently obtain consent for treatment before treatment is given, emphasizes Susan Baxley, corporate admitting manager for Sacramento, CA-based Adventist Health System.
-
Study: Growth slows in health care spending; OIG seeks proposals for safe-harbor provisions; AHA survey shows hospital use rising; CMS publishes quality survey tool
