Since 2010 there have been 47 rural hospital closures. The reasons behind the closures vary but the message rings true, rural hospitals are struggling. With difficulties from implanting EHR to the re-evaluation of Medicare reimbursements, rural hospitals are looking for new ways to stay afloat. Here are the top 4 trends we see effecting rural hospitals in 2015.
With the new roll out date of ICD-10 finally on the calendar, healthcare providers and payers alike have been preparing for the change.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid issued a report covering the trajectory of healthcare expenditures in the United States and found that in 2013, spending only went up by 3.6 percent. With a heavily conservative Congress, it seems likely that the dismantling of the Affordable Care Act may be on top of the Congressional to do list. While the spending increase has been consistent over the last several years, it has also been relatively slow; the data doesn’t suggest an enormous, irreversible spike initiated by the ACA. However, the slow-creep of rising expenditures is still troubling.
A November 2014 audit from the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) showed that as many states move from Medicaid to Managed Care Organizations (MCOs), access to a primary care physician involves some serious wait time. Because of these wait times, more and more Medicaid patients are filtering into healthcare systems through their emergency rooms, which impacts the continuum of care in a negative way.
2014 was another year big year for healthcare. As we continue to move toward a more patient-centered and transparent healthcare system, so too continue the changes to our payment models, insurance coverage and commitment to patient outcome measures. While there were many changes to keep track of, three things seem to have defined the progress made in the scope of revenue cycle improvement.
Healthcare has become something of a hard science, if the focus on data and numbers is any indication. It would seem that the research, the endless reporting and spreadsheets of healthcare administration, has served to at least shed light on the problems healthcare is currently facing as an industry - but the fix isn’t likely to be in black and white.
As 2014 draws to a close, many of us in the healthcare industry are looking back at the year we’ve had and reflect on what worked, what needs to change and what we can expect for 2015. As an industry, healthcare saw a continued move towards accountable care, shared decision making, value-based purchasing and patient satisfaction measures. Buzzwords abound, there was a lot for everyone - providers, patients and payers - to juggle this year. And it looks like the trend is apt to continue into 2015.
Even though the Accountable Care Act has only been on the scene for many since Obama signed it into law back in 2010, the idea of accountable care vastly predates the law itself. The Clinton Administration had taken a similar model to Congress in the 90s, which was almost immediately denied, in part because the market wasn’t prepared for a payment reformation. Of course, not that it was any more ready come the 2000s, when the United States entered into a period of, in recent decades anyway, unprecedented economic recession. Still, the ACA went ahead and so too did the expectations placed on hospitals, providers and patients within the healthcare market.
Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) may have an additional three years before penalties would be enforced for poor performance, according to a new proposal by the Federal government. These groups of doctors, hospitals, and providers that care for Medicare patients work jointly as ACOs toward the goal of retaining whatever additional financial resources are left over after completed care. Currently, there are about 330 ACOs in the United States, and together they have saved Medicare more than $700 million in healthcare spending.
We hear a lot about bi-partisanship in politics - but what about healthcare? Sometimes it seems like the payers and the providers, the administrative and the clinical, are across the aisle from one another in more ways than one, and it brings to mind the challenges faced by politicians who just can’t see from the other side’s perspective. While politics shoulders many competing agendas, when it comes to healthcare the bottom line is the same no matter where you are: good health for the best price. This is even true of the patient’s themselves, who are becoming more and more concerned with the cost of the services they receive - and using the internet to find out if there’s a better “bargain” on care somewhere else.