All GLG News Analyses Filed Under: Healthcare Services

The last several years as seen the growth of financial incentives to stimulate improvements in patient safety and patient outcomes.  Clearly society has an interest in improving patient safety, and aligning providers and payers financially is a laudable goal. The use of denied payments raises the...

We are reaching a tipping point where health plans are no longer able to raise rates quickly enough to cover their increasing Medical Loss Ratios in the commercial market. As the commercial sector becomes tighter, plans have expanded into Federal and State contracts with Medicare and Medicaid to maintain...

For at least the past twenty years, the American method of reimbursing hosptials has come under fire for reimbursing hosptials for what they do, rather than how well they do it.  In the past ten years, there have been a growing number of "pay for performance" initiatives attempting to rectify...

Pay for performance is here, and being used in actual reimbursements.    This is an example of this in the private payor model.

Medicare will not pay for sponges left in from surgery, broken bones from falls in the hospital when admitted for something else and will not pay for infections that ocured due to error in policy as well as operation such as infections due to catheters and wounds. REVOLUTIONARY!!!!

Well....we know CMS doesn't have enough money to fund healthcare in perpetuity.   Physicians have been taking reimbursement cuts or lack of raises over the last 5 years.    Realizing you can't squezze enough money out of the physicians, Medican now brilliantly plans to...

In 2008, Medicare will no longer pay the cost for hospital care related to certain types of errors including some hospital acquired infections.  This continued decrease in reimbursement will hurt those hospitals most in need of new information systems and increased staffing.

Is access to healthcare equal for everyone or only for the wealthy.

Many hospitals are struggling with the finances of improving patient safety. This takes capitol. Having hospital penalized financially for medical errors some of which are inherent to the system, will only cause the demise of some institutions. What will happen to those patients? I guess the people...

- Some studies show that medical errors continue to increase despite an intense focus on this issue over the last recent years. This decision by CMS should bring even more attention to this whole area of patient safety and error prevention - There will need to be increased documentation to "prove"...