The U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently announced the health care organizations chosen to participate in the Bundled Payments for Care Improvement (BCPI) Initiative.  The BCPI Initiative represents a significant expansion of CMS's use of bundled payments in traditional Medicare, and is part of an effort to incentivize greater care coordination and increase provider accountability as the agency seeks to move away from its reliance on traditional fee-for-service payments.

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How well hospitals keep patients alive isn't associated with how well they do at keeping patients from bouncing back to their facilities, concludes a study in yesterday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

Researchers looked at Medicare patients who had heart attacks or pneumonia between 2005 and 2008 and found no link between hospital readmission rates and mortality rates.

Moreover, hospital factors, such as ownership structure and teaching status, had little to no effect on the relationship between readmissions and deaths, MedPage Today reported.

The study also indicted hospitals should be tracking both measures of readmissions and mortality to gauge quality.

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Effective for year 2012, income statement disclosure requirements under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) for bad debt allowances have been revised. Until now, healthcare entities have reported bad debt allowances in the statement of operations as either part of net patient service revenue or as an operating expense. Effective for calendar year 2012 financial statements, the provision for bad debts should be separately presented as a deduction from patient service revenue (net of contractual allowances and discounts).                     Read More>>>

Source:  Goldstein, Schechter Koch

The Florida Board of Medicine's Surgical Care/Quality Assurance Committee has been reviewing Rule 64B8-9.007, Florida Administrative Code - Standards of Practice in an effort to reduce the number of wrong patient, wrong site and/or wrong procedure disciplinary cases. This rule outlines requirements for taking a pause prior to beginning surgery to ensure you have the right patient, the right site and are performing the right surgery as described in the Informed Consent signed by the patient. The Board continues to see disciplinary cases in which the required "pause" is performed but surgery is still performed on the wrong patient, wrong site or the wrong procedure is performed. The Committee met three times and heard public testimony. During that testimony, it was determined the definition of surgery also needed to be clarified. Changes to the rule include...

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