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Observation status has been under the radar for a while, and with the two-midnight rule in full force, getting patients to the right place on a ward or discharged appropriately has taken on new urgency.
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when you thought you were getting a handle on reducing readmissions for your Medicare population, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has another task for you: Look at your Medicaid readmissions, because you may find that those patients are bouncing back in at least the same quantity as your older patients.
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Monitoring patients’ hearts with telemetry seems innocuous enough. It’s not invasive, and it’s an extra pair of eyes keeping track of a key vital function.
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More patients have access to insurance coverage today, but they also have higher out-of-pocket responsibility.
“Our greatest challenge is getting the information we need to verify healthcare benefits and coverage for their stay,” says Susan Kole, director of patient access at Saint Francis Hospital and Medical Center in Hartford, CT.
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Payments made online have doubled over the past two years at Cincinnati (OH) Children’s Hospital Medical Center, reports Christopher Lah, senior director of revenue cycle customer service.
“About 15.5% of total dollars collected went through the portal,” says Lah. “The portal is starting to have a significant impact on both our copay collections and other out-of-pocket expenses.” With 27,919 online payments made in 2014, $5.3 million was collected, with an average of $193 paid per transaction.
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With all the talk about encryption and other high-tech ways to safeguard protected health information (PHI), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) violations still can be traced to the simplest task: jotting down notes about a patient on a piece of paper.
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If one of your registrars was offered a little more money or better hours by another area of the hospital, would he or she find your patient access department impossible to leave?
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The two most common sources of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) breaches are unintended disclosure, such as misdirected emails and faxes (31%) and the physical loss of paper records (24%), which is particularly prevalent among healthcare organizations.
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Some payers are changing their care management programs to reflect Medicare’s requirements, such as the “two-midnight” rule. This change affects patient access areas, says Pamela D. Scott, MBA, revenue cycle administrator at Genesis Health System in Davenport, IA.
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Any healthcare organization with a presence in Florida will be affected by the Florida Information Protection Act of 2014 (FIPA), which expands the requirements on covered entities that acquire, maintain, store, or use personal information of Floridians.