Is It Time for a Billing Operations Check-Up? How to Assess the Health of Your Revenue Cycle

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Balancing the competitive landscape that comes with physician practice consolidation combined with population health and the shift to value-based care is a lot to consider for busy hospital physician practices. Add in the constant changes in regulatory guidelines, enhancing the patient experience and most importantly – a continued focus on quality and safety and most hospital administrators have little resources left to focus on improving the revenue cycle.

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3 Ways Hospitals Can Improve Their CMS Star Rating (Regardless of its Flaws)

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Lots of questions and headlines began swirling earlier this month after the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released its hospital star ratings – a “seemingly” simple system designed to help consumers make informed decisions about hospitals and the care they deliver. While consumers are used to 5-star ratings for hotels and restaurants, the healthcare industry is clearly far more complex. As such, a cloud of mystery and skepticism surrounds this incredibly powerful rating system – especially for the thousands of hospitals who participate in Medicare and are therefore automatically subject to stardom whether they like it or not.

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800 Hospitals Forfeit 1% of Revenue to CMS For Poor Performance

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Last week, CMS reported that 800 hospitals will be required to forfeit 1 percent of their reimbursement for missing the mark on reducing hospital-acquired conditions (HACs). The race to eliminate preventable patient harm has always been a top hospital goal, but now it’s one tied to their reimbursement through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Hospital-Acquired Condition Reduction Program (HACRP). No matter how hard hospitals work to improve their performance, CMS will penalize the lowest performing quartile (25%) of hospitals annually.

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CMS Will Only Adjust Medicaid Rules – Not Drastically Change Them

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After much ballyhoo and for years of promising a major overhaul to the cost-prohibitive Obama-era managed care rules, the CMS has issued a proposed regulation that makes smaller changes – not the drastic “gutting” that had been promised — to the standards states meet when running their Medicaid plans.

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Billions of Dollars Flow into Private Medicaid Plans with NO Cost Oversight or Efficacy of Treatment Determined

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Cost containment has become a leading factor in the delivery of healthcare. What are some of the issues that are contributing to these burgeoning costs? One of them is Medicaid. We spent over $576 billion on Medicaid programs in 2017, as reported by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

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