There are now nearly 500 Medicare accountable care organizations (ACOs) participating in the Shared Savings Program and the Pioneer ACO Model combined. About one-third of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), fee-for-service payments are tied to these alternative payment models saving over $411 million for Medicare in just one year….
Continue Reading...We’ve written previously about how quality care occurs at the intersection of time and efficiency — interestingly, though, the most efficient hospitals have systems in place that translate directly to high-quality care. The concepts, it seems, are inextricably linked. To wit: Out of nearly 1300 hospitals, the authors chose four hospitals to…
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Now that ICD-10 is here, it’s more important than ever that you submit clean claims for services provided to Medicare patients, as well as those with private insurance. Early reports indicate that the denial rate since the transition to ICD-10 is hovering around 10%. That’s at the high end of the industry-average…
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Recently, there’s been a lot of misinformation floating around about medical scribes. It’s understandable that physicians and hospitals may be wary of the idea if they’ve never worked with scribes. A lot of ideas for the “next best thing” in medicine are touted at seemingly every turn, it’s true. However,…
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Research has shown that using medical scribes confers a laundry list of benefits. Patient satisfaction increaseswhere scribes are used, for a start. Physicians, too, experience an increase in job satisfaction, according to a report in the Annals of Family Medicine — not to mention the time savings they report. One physician says he can now review 15 to 20…
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Sometimes, it’s hard to tell whether healthcare is in such turmoil because the people on the inside of the system — administrators, physicians, nurses — are leading the charge to do more, and more efficiently for a growing number of patients; or if it’s because the institutions outside the system…
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Electronic health records (EHR) are here to stay. There’s even a federal program administered by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to encourage “meaningful use” of digital documentation. On the surface, the idea of implementing EHR is great: issues with illegible handwriting and sharing paper records should be eliminated, and information…
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It has been some time since our last post about the VA scandal and it is time to check into what has happened since then. It has recently come to light that senior department officials in Washington knew the serious problems the VA hospital in Phoenix had long before it became public news. So despite…
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ACO – Is it a new name for HMO? What do we actually know about ACOs? So before we write it off as being “HMO-like” and destined to fail, let us try to understand why the mention of “ACO” evokes such mixed reactions. First and foremost, ACO is not a new concept. First…
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Errors in documentation can occur along the patient trajectory — e.g., the patient doesn’t describe symptoms correctly, medical staff improperly triage the patient, the physician incorrectly interprets symptoms — or along the paper trail. When something is incorrectly entered into the documentation, it is handed through the care pathway, on to…
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