According to a report in MedCityNews.com, a startup company named Health Recovery Solutions has created an online tool that calculates the Medicare penalty for every U.S. hospital. Available at healthrecoverysolutions.com/resources.php, the calculation is based on publicly available Medicare data for readmission rates, Diagnosis-Related Group reimbursement data and the published formula for how to calculate […]

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This article indicates some of the key predictions  for healthcare change in this country by several seminal thinkers, such as Donald Berwick, former CMS administrator. What changes  will “work” or not in the next years of the Obama Administration are identified and discussed.

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  Faced with capped reimbursements and rising operational costs, Mike Little and Maria Radwanski, RN MSN, CRRN, respectively CEO and President of Health Calls Home Health in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, have found success by staying ahead of the technology wave. At the top of their priority list was making their agency attractive to hospitals and for that […]

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Monday of this week was October 1, 2012, the first day of Federal Fiscal Year 2013. The first day of a new Supreme Court session and the first day of Medicare hospital readmission penalties. The mass media has finally heard that Medicare will reduce payments to hospitals with high readmission rates by a predetermined percentage […]

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  What we in healthcare have been watching for more than a year finally broke through into the mass media on Monday, October 1, the day Medicare began to issue penalties to hospitals with high readmission rates. Thick books, lengthy blogs and hours of conference presentations were compressed into a few paragraphs for public consumption. […]

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  By Tim Rowan At first glance, discussion of Meaningful Use of Electronic Health Records (EHR), the standard by which the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT will determine eligibility for stimulus payments to healthcare providers, is only of interest to hospitals and physicians. This could be a costly assumption for home health […]

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By Cindy Campbell, RN, BSN “As we move to patient-centered care, our challenge is to use technology to reduce the work of being sick…” One of the most popular presentations at last month’s Healthcare Unbound conference in San Francisco was delivered by home care nurse, executive and consultant Cynthia Campbell, RN, BSN. A longtime home […]

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