Since moving into Hernando County nearly 15 years ago, Health Management Associates has transformed two bankrupt hospitals into modern facilities with whopping profit margins. Brooksville and Spring Hill Regional Hospitals are a success story for the for-profit chain, which cites them as an example of how it turns around troubled institutions while providing high quality care and serving the poor. It's a track record the Naples-based company has urged St. Petersburg officials to examine as HMA seeks an 80 percent ownership stake in Bayfront Medical Center.
Several hospitals in the state have laid off staff recently, and some officials said new health care regulations and requirements played a role in their decision. "We are facing reform at the federal level, and the new (state Medicaid) KanCare program," said Steven Perkins, CEO of South Central Kansas Medical Center in Arkansas City, which announced two weeks ago that it would cut nine staff members—seven full-time, one part-time and one "as needed" employee.
While states such as Massachusetts and California are grappling with issues of hospital overcrowding, Maine has the opposite problem. The bulk of Maine's hospitals are below the national average for occupancy rates, which raises questions about whether the state needs all 36 of its acute care centers. Hospital officials, however, said the number of beds filled is not a complete gauge of hospital effectiveness.
While federal health IT officials were touting the perceived successes of their efforts to increase physician usage of electronic health records (EHRs), one longtime advocate of EHRs was criticizing the whole direction of health IT policy. "In my opinion, there is not one successful EHR system in the whole world," said C. Peter Waegemann, who founded and ran the Boston-based Medical Records Institute from 1984 to 2009. "User friendliness, usability, and interoperability are not there," he added in an interview with InformationWeek Healthcare.
Congress should permanently repeal Medicare's flawed payment formula as part of a year-end deal to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff, the Alliance of Specialty Medicine said Monday. The Alliance said a deal to avoid the fiscal cliff should include a permanent "doc fix." Doctors will see their Medicare payments cut by nearly 30 percent at the end of this year if Congress does not act, although a permanent fix is unlikely.
Medicare may have overpaid an estimated $424 million to PacifiCare of California's Medicare Advantage plan based on risk assessments that in many cases made patients seem sicker than they were, according to a federal oversight agency. Medicare Advantage plans send patient diagnosis codes to Medicare, which boosts plan rates if clients are affected by serious medical conditions. A new report by the U.S. Health and Human Services inspector general says PacifiCare was paid extra for treating patients with cancer or a dangerous bloodstream infection even though medical records didn't describe those ailments.