Every month we cover a different educational topic to keep healthcare financial leaders on top of the challenges they face.
This Month’s Resources
- Blog: What Comes After Price Transparency?
- Talk price transparency with other hospital finance leaders on LinkedIn
- Recommended Modules
- What’s the Cost of not Knowing Your Cost
Oi Healthcare News Roundup
CMS Price Transparency Audits Begin
With the January 1st deadline in the past, CMS has begun auditing a sample of hospitals to evaluate compliance with price transparency policies.
The agency is additionally looking at complaints, with hospitals who do not post negotiated prices potentially facing a fine of $300 per day or a corrective action plan. Researches have expressed their frustration with non compliance and being forced to dig through hospital websites for the information they need.
CMS Hospital Price Transparency Portal
To support hospitals in executing their price transparency initiatives and complying with agency deadlines, CMS offers a resource page targeted toward hospitals. The page covers key provisions of price transparency and standard charge posting, including:
- Requirements to post machine readable files
- Guidelines for posting a “consumer-friendly display of shoppable services”
- Deadlines on monitoring and enforcing price transparency requirements, including penalties for non-compliance (a warning notice, corrective action plan, imposition of civil monetary penalties, and publication of that penalty on a CMS website).
- Links to details on monitoring and enforcement, including 45 CFR Subpart C and for information on appealing a civil monetary penalty refer to 45 CFR Subpart D.
Answers to price transparency FAQs are available here.
Hospitals Need Cost Accounting in a Value-Based World
This article from Becker’s highlightings the importance of the fundamentals of cost accounting for tackling the costing of patient services. This article talks with Jeff Lambert, our COO, and features his insights into research from HIMSS analytics.
It highlights the challenges of using “rudimentary” cost accounting methodologies and why these approaches do not fully account for resources and related costs — a particular liability for hospitals involved in ACOs because of the nature of their reimbursement model.
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