The Ethical Healthpreneur

Link to original post CMS aims to improve access to care, increase quality and cuts costs by reducing readmissions and unnecessary ER visits. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has unveiled a new strategy it said will make it easier for clinicians in rural areas to use telehealth technologies.  The new CMS strategy comes as some hospitals are forging ahead with telemedicine and essentially betting that the regulatory landscape will become clearer in the short-term.  "To promote the use of telehealth, CMS will seek to reduce some of the barriers to telehealth such as reimbursement, cross-state licensure issues, and the administrative and financial burden to implement telemedicine," the agency said in its Rural Health Strategy. Getting paid for performing telehealth services has been a roadblock for many hospitals, not just those located in rural areas. But rural hospitals may more keenly feel workplace shortages as baby boomers age and need more services. CMS did

Link to original post   The platform allows providers to readily access meaningful data no matter where it lives in the revenue cycle. Change Healthcare has unveiled a new version of its Acuity Revenue Cycle Analytics that will will enable users to track and gather data across the revenue cycle continuum.  Change's move to boost revenue cycle solution comes at a time when such products are in high demand, as hospitals strive to grab every dollar and either maintain or grow margins and footprints. Healthcare organizations are poised to spend more than $90 billion worldwide by 2022, an outlook spike from about $51 billion in 2017, according to a recent Research and Markets report. So it's not surprising that startups such as Recondo and Payformance introduced new rev cycle tools earlier this year while bigger players such as Cognizant bought Bolder Healthcare Solutions to round out its RCM portfolio earlier this year.  Hospitals use such tools to optimize collections, cut insur

Link to original post . Healthcare organizations that use multiple RCM systems have higher rates of denials and big difficulties gathering and normalizing data, says Mike Miliard , Editor, Healthcare IT News. More than three-quarters of the hospitals surveyed for a new HIMSS Analytics study said that denials are the biggest challenge they face with revenue cycle management. One reason for that could be their use of multiple IT systems that don't mesh well together with various systems looking at numbers in different ways, the report, commissioned from HIMSS Analytics by Dimensional Insight, a developer of analytics and business intelligence technology, suggested. Seventy-six percent of hospitals – ranging in bed-size from 50 to 500 –  said denials were the biggest challenge they faced with RCM – far more than revenue integrity (36 percent), patient pay (34 percent), collections (29 percent) and capturing ICD codes (27 percent). Of those having the most trouble with denials, 72.

Link to original post The Michigan health system, one of the largest in the U.S., says it wants to roll out a single, enterprise platform to deliver "people-centered care. It's a big week for Epic implementations in the Upper Midwest. The world-class Mayo Clinic is ready to go live with its newly-minted system on May 5, after more than three years of work. And today comes news that sprawling Trinity Health, based in Livonia, Michigan, has selected Epic to build out its own enterprise-wide electronic health record and revenue cycle management system. It's a process the Catholic health system expects will take four years to implement across its 94 hospitals and 109 continuing care locations. The expected cost of the deal was not disclosed. Trinity officials said the integrated Epic platform will allow the health system to improve experiences for patients and clinicians across the board. "People deserve customized and convenient healthcare experiences, including simpl