If you spend less on auto maintenance, you eventually spend more on repair. If you never paint your house, you eventually have to replace trim boards and eaves. If you save money by not watering your lawn, you end up with dust and mud. The state of California announced this week that it believes these principles do not apply to the cause-and-effect relationship between home care and nursing homes.
Vermont Information Technology Leaders, Inc. (VITL), the non-profit organization facilitating the expanded use of health information technology in Vermont, and Allscripts (Nasdaq: MDRX), the Chicago-based health information technology provider with a major facility located in South Burlington, Vermont, announced last week their intention to enter into a strategic alliance.
If Microsoft has “won” the Operating System battle and the Office Suite battle, why is it having so much trouble competing in the Smart Phone wars? According to reliable information leaked from the company’s recent closed-door Venture Capital Summit, CEO Steve Ballmer answers that question by admitting, “We screwed up!”
A comprehensive new report provides nine hospital recidivism success stories about inter-agency collaboration projects in nine different regions. We found two that include home health care agencies using advanced technology as their projects’ center pins. This week, a home care agency, hospital and senior clinic in Denver worked together to reduce 30-day readmissions from 20% […]
To know how your business is doing, you must know not only what your bottom line is but how much better it could be. How much total business is in your marketplace and are you getting the same percentage of it today as in the past? You know all about your slice of the pie […]
“Information Technology is not the end game, it is a means to the end.” In an exclusive HCTR interview accompanying the publication of an important new article, former home care CIO Fran Lorion summed up his “Lesson Number One,” acquired during an IT career that started at IBM and ended with 12 years at
On August 19, 2009, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued an interim final rule entitled “Breach Notification for Unsecured Protected Health Information.” This rule describes how healthcare providers must notify patients when the security of their protected health information has been breached. Providers must comply with these new requirements beginning on September […]
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) proposal to place a 2.5% cap on Home Health PPS outlier payments in CY2010 will produce meaningful healthcare savings without negatively impacting patient access to care. Such is the determination announced this week by Healthcare Market Resources (HMR), a research company that provides customized local market analysis […]
Recovery Audit Contractors (RAC) are expected to turn their attention to home health care providers sometime next year, looking for reasons to recoup PPS episode payments received as far back as October, 2007. If, as is anticipated once they get started, they use the same reasons Regional Home Health Intermediaries (RHHI), Qualified Independent Contractors (QIC) […]
Medicare has published results of payment denials and reconsiderations for CY2007. Home care does fairly well, according to this report, except that fewer than 2%
