Jul 13, 2016 | Coding, Billing, and Collections, Compliance, Legal, and Malpractice, Laboratory News, Laboratory Operations, Laboratory Pathology, Managed Care Contracts & Payer Reimbursement, Management & Operations
The amount of patient debt healthcare providers face depends on multiple, complex factors, including whether they engaged in Medicaid Expansion
Often the challenges facing hospitals and medical pathology laboratories are similar. So it is with patient debt. Blame that on two trends. One is the increase in the number of patients with high-deductible health plans. The other is the increase in the number of people enrolled via the Affordable Care Act (ACA) health insurance exchanges with similar high-deductible health plans.
These two factors are contributing to increased levels of bad debt that confront the nation’s hospitals, clinical laboratories, and anatomic pathology groups. However, in some states where Medicaid programs have been expanded, hospitals have reported declines in the level of patient bad debt.
When President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law in 2010, many people thought that fewer uninsured people would mean less bad debt for hospitals. Now, six years later, the reality is not so clear-cut.
Hospitals, clinical laboratories, and other entities within the healthcare system are seeing different levels of bad debt depending on what part of the country they are in, what kinds of policies they have enacted, and probably most importantly, whether or not the state in which they are located has expanded Medicaid. (more…)
Feb 20, 2015 | Coding, Billing, and Collections, Laboratory Management and Operations, Laboratory News, Laboratory Operations, Laboratory Pathology, Management & Operations
NPR stations in San Francisco and Los Angeles crowdsourced healthcare cost data from listeners to reveal arbitrary pricing of medical services
Over the past two years, Dark Daily has published a number of stories dealing with price transparency, or lack of it, most of which involved government agencies or nonprofits concerned about the high cost of healthcare services. This latest effort to shine a light on healthcare pricing, however, comes from National Public Radio (NPR).
San Francisco’s NPR station, KQED, initiated PriceCheck, an innovative project designed to reveal just how arbitrary medical pricing is in California, in June 2014. KQED partnered with Los Angeles’ NPR station, KPCC, and ClearHealthCosts.com, a New York City start-up that publishes a national list of low to high charges for common healthcare services, to crowdsource healthcare cost data.
The two NPR stations appealed to listeners to share the charges they paid for four medical services: mammograms, lower-back MRIs, IUDs, and diabetes testing. Hundreds of people responded to share prices they paid for these services, and thousands of people looked up prices on ClearHealthCosts.com. (more…)
Dec 3, 2014 | Coding, Billing, and Collections, Laboratory Hiring & Human Resources, Laboratory Operations, Laboratory Pathology, Laboratory Sales and Marketing, Laboratory Testing
Researchers at the University of California San Francisco revealed that the cost for a simple cholesterol test ranged from as little as $10 to as much as $10,169!
Clinical laboratories owned by hospitals and health systems should take note of a public study of hospital laboratory test prices that was conducted by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF). It was published this summer and showed a remarkable range of prices for medical laboratory tests charged by California hospitals.
How about a charge of $10,169 for a routine blood cholesterol test? This was one finding a study discussed in the August 2014 issue of the British Medical Journal Open blog. The study was led by Renee Hsia, M.D.. She is an associate professor of Emergency Medicine and Health Policy at the UCSF Medical School. Hsia and her colleagues compared charges for 10 common clinical laboratory tests that were reported in 2011 by all non-federal California hospitals. (more…)
Jan 27, 2014 | Coding, Billing, and Collections, Compliance, Legal, and Malpractice, Laboratory Management and Operations, Laboratory News, Laboratory Operations, Laboratory Pathology
Employers and health insurers want more consumers use healthcare cost estimator tools and pride when choosing a hospital, physician, or clinical laboratory
Having put millions of consumers into high-deductible health plans (HDHPs) as one way to control healthcare costs, both employers and health insurers are now challenged to help these same consumers do better at using price and quality factors when selecting providers.
One solution to this problem is to encourage physicians to play a greater role in helping their patients use price and quality when it is time to select a provider. Obviously, these decisions can involve which clinical laboratory or anatomic pathology practice a patient should select when he or she needs medical laboratory testing.
(more…)
Aug 26, 2013 | Coding, Billing, and Collections, Compliance, Legal, and Malpractice, Laboratory Hiring & Human Resources, Laboratory Management and Operations, Laboratory News, Laboratory Operations, Laboratory Pathology, Laboratory Sales and Marketing, Managed Care Contracts & Payer Reimbursement, Management & Operations, News From Dark Daily
Study Finds Most State Websites Aimed at Transparency in Healthcare Pricing Inaccurate and Basically Useless in Helping Consumers Shop for Services
With growth in high-deductible health plans, healthcare is becoming increasingly consumer-driven. But shopping for healthcare services isn’t easy due to lack of available resources that enable consumers to compare price and quality, according to a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
Recently, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) revealed the arbitrary nature of hospital prices by publishing hospital-specific costs and outcomes data for 3,000 hospitals nationwide, according to a report published by Dark Daily. This step towards full transparency is aimed at helping consumers comparative shop for hospitals based on both quality and value.
(more…)
