West Penn Allegheny Health System posted a $47.9 million operating loss for the fourth quarter ending June 30, a new state filing shows. In May, West Penn Allegheny reported an operating loss of $99 million through the first nine months of the fiscal year, so this past year's losses likely will approach $150 million when those results are released this fall. West Penn Allegheny's net losses for the quarter, budgeted to be $19.2 million, amounted to $41.2 million. It did report that it has 74.2 days cash on hand as of June 30, compared with 62.2 days a year ago.
In 12 remote patient monitoring deals this year, venture capitalists put a total of $102 million into RPM companies, reports Rock Health, a seed fund for digital health. Why the focus on remote monitoring technology? Investors are betting that new federal requirements and changes in how doctors get paid will force hospitals to buy more gadgets to help watch over and care for patients outside the hospital setting. The Affordable Care Act is expected to push more medical billing from the traditional fee-for-service model to the new fee-for-performance model; in other words, hospitals will get paid to keep people healthy.
The part of President Obama's Affordable Care Act that requires Americans to obtain health insurance has been a contentious issue politically, but new advertising from the 17 states setting up marketplaces where residents will buy insurance tends to be buoyant. New commercials for the Oregon exchange, called Cover Oregon, for example, resemble something from a tourism bureau. In one commercial, the singer Matt Sheehy performs an anthemic song, "Long Live Oregonians," that is reminiscent of "This Land Is Your Land" by Woody Guthrie.
A key House panel unanimously approved a bill on Wednesday that would replace the formula that pays doctors for each service provided under Medicare with one that rewards providers for high-quality care — a measure that both sides of the political aisle praised as long overdue. The 51-0 vote by the Committee on Energy and Commerce sends the Medicare Patient Access and Quality Improvement Act to the full chamber. For years, lawmakers had been exploring ways to repeal the way physicians are paid under the health entitlement for seniors and replace it with a more predictable model that rewards the quality, and not the quantity, of care that doctors provide.
The number of short, expensive inpatient hospital stays would be significantly reduced under policies in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' proposed hospital inpatient prospective payment system (IPPS) rule, a July 30 report by the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General found. According to the report, Hospitals' Use of Observation Stays and Short Inpatient Stays for Medicare Beneficiaries (OEI-02-12-00040), short inpatient stays on average cost Medicare and beneficiaries more than observation stays. The report made no recommendations and was issued in its final form.
ATLANTA — Two large hospital operators paid kickbacks to clinics that directed expectant mothers living in the country illegally to their hospitals and filed fraudulent Medicaid claims on those patients, a federal whistleblower lawsuit unsealed Wednesday said. Naples, Fla.-based Health Management Associates and Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare Corp. and their affiliates entered into contracts with clinics operated by Hispanic Medical Management and Clinica de la Mama and their affiliates, the lawsuit says. The clinics then referred pregnant women living in the country without authorization to for-profit hospitals operated by HMA and Tenet in exchange for kickbacks from fraudulent Medicaid claims, the lawsuit says.