When Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield put together its narrow network for Obamacare insurance policies, its price of admission was for hospitals to take a knife to their facility fees. Why? Because in health care, that's where the money is. If you've never heard of a facility fee, you're not alone. But if you've ever had surgery, any kind of imaging scan or even just a blood test, then you've paid one. It's the part of the bill that pays for the building where your procedure took place, as well as all the staff employed there. Physicians are typically paid separately for their work in treating or diagnosing you.
If you've ever gotten a hospital bill, you know how confusing it can be. That's why many hospitals across the country are starting to post their list of prices for common procedures on their websites. Crouse Hospital is the first in Central New York. People can visit www.crouse.org/prices, and it'll allows people to search costs of common procedures. The price only includes the hospital stay, supplies, and/or time. The price does not include doctors' fees. The website then shows how many times that procedure was performed in the last year and the average price patients paid. Crouse Hospital will update the prices every year.
Faced with increasingly worrisome economic challenges, four North Country hospitals said Monday they have signed an agreement to work together to try and find ways to "improve quality, increase efficiencies and lower cost of health care delivery in the region." The hospitals said their problems range from growing healthcare costs to Medicaid payments that don't always cover services provided to the poor. And, the situation has been getting worse, said Russell Keene, the CEO at Androscoggin Valley Hospital in Berlin.
A Dallas businessman's hospitals improperly billed Medicare 80 percent of the time and kept doing so even after government auditors repeatedly warned administrators of the problem, according to federal court records. The stark pattern, reflecting "improper diagnostic codes," was disclosed last week in government court filings leading up to Dr. Tariq Mahmood's trial on fraud conspiracy charges starting Monday in a Tyler federal court. "When this evidence is coupled with witness testimony that the defendant was directing individuals to submit fraudulently changed codes, it proves the existence of the defendant's scheme to defraud Medicare," according to a motion filed by the U.S. attorney's office for the Eastern District of Texas.
Health officials on Monday advised patients of a West Virginia pain management clinic to be tested for blood-borne infectious diseases after an investigation found that needles had been reused. The investigation by West Virginia health officials found that, prior to November 2013, needles and syringes were reused at Valley Pain Management in McMechen to administer pain medications and saline solutions. They said the same pain medication vial was used for more than one patient. These injection practices potentially exposed patients to diseases such as hepatitis B, hepatitis C and HIV, according to health department officials in West Virginia and Ohio. Health officials urged patients from both states to be tested.
In the premiere issue of the journal Burnout Research, which is dedicated to research on the topic, Anthony Montgomery, an associate professor in the Psychology of Work and Organizations in the University of Macedonia in Greece, focused on physician burnout, and argues that the way doctors are trained may set them up for a career of frustrations and high-stress situations. And the consequences may be hurting the care they provide patients. He says that while doctors interact with people on a daily basis, their training and their worth as physicians are focused almost entirely on their technical capabilities, leaving them with few tools for understanding and navigating social interactions and for collaborating as part of a larger team or organization.