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When Peggy ONeill, admitting director for St. Helena Hospital in Deer Park, CA, began tackling the improvements involved in a major restructuring of the admitting department, she looked first at the bottom line.
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About 18 not-for-profit hospitals in 15 states have been hit with class-action lawsuits filed in federal courts challenging their tax-exempt status as charity institutions.
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When the patient access department at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center-Presbyterian in Philadelphia has its monthly staff meeting these days, theres an added attraction. After the insurance updates, schedule changes, and other pertinent matters are handled, attendees are asked to participate in an interactive customer service initiative.
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The third stage of an ambitious campaign aimed at streamlining emergency department operations gets under way this month as Baptist Memorial Health Care in Memphis, TN, begins recruiting members for a new ED volunteer corps. Whats unusual about this hospital volunteer initiative is that it is targeted to young people who may be considering jobs in the health care field.
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Nearly 82 million Americans younger than 65 went without health insurance for all or part of 2002 and 2003, according to a report released recently by Families USA.
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The HIPAA Implementation Working Group, a coalition formed to help providers and vendors better understand the process by which the HIPAA electronic standards are developed and modified and to increase provider and vendor representation in that process, has contacted Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) administrator Mark McClellan to express concern over a CMS instruction to fiscal intermediaries to reject claims lacking certain data elements not needed by Medicare for claims adjudication.
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The HIPAA Conformance Certification Organization says its Common Compliance Assessment Process determined that, on average, the nations leading HIPAA translation and validation vendors agree in their interpretation of compliance 43% of the time, up from an average of 35% on all transactions in 2003.
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The labor and delivery department may be where the risk of infant abductions is greatest, but it is far from the only area of the hospital needing a risk managers attention. Children are often taken from other areas of the hospital that may not receive as much attention.
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All the hospitals where infant abductions have occurred identified unmonitored elevator or stairwell access to the postpartum and nursery areas as a root cause, according to information from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations.
