Partners Healthcare, one of 10 hospital systems that has joined a nationwide health care consortium designed to reduce health care’s environmental impact, says it will save $15 million per year as part of an energy overhaul. Partners is the parent of Massachusetts General Hospital and the Brigham and Women's Hospital. The Healthier Hospitals Initiative, launched by California’s Kaiser Permanente, includes 500 hospitals nationwide who will take steps to conserve energy, reduce use of toxic chemicals, and reduce waste, including hazardous waste.
Partners Healthcare, one of 10 hospital systems that has joined a nationwide health care consortium designed to reduce health care’s environmental impact, says it will save $15 million per year as part of an energy overhaul. Partners is the parent of Massachusetts General Hospital and the Brigham and Women's Hospital. The Healthier Hospitals Initiative, launched by California’s Kaiser Permanente, includes 500 hospitals nationwide who will take steps to conserve energy, reduce use of toxic chemicals, and reduce waste, including hazardous waste.
Highmark Inc.'s board of directors has enlisted the help of an executive recruiting company to conduct its search for a new CEO. Finding a new CEO is one of the first steps Highmark's board must take in cleaning up after the firing of former CEO Kenneth Melani, who was jettisoned this week after getting in a fight with his girlfriend's husband. Highmark in particular, and Blue Cross Blue Shield insurers in general, have looked internally when it comes to appointing a new CEO.
The Henry Ford Health System last year overcame lackluster investment returns and ever-growing costs to care for uninsured people to make $21.5 million on $4.22 billion in revenues, down from a $60-million gain the year before. But the health system, the region’s largest, with five hospitals, 24,000 employees and 36 primary care centers in southeast Michigan, continued to show gains in hospital admissions.
Patients cut back on prescription drugs and doctor visits last year, a sign that many Americans are still struggling to pay for healthcare, according to a study released Wednesday. The report, issued by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics, said 2011 was also a breakthrough year for the drug industry, which introduced 34 new medicines, the most in a decade. The number of prescriptions issued to patients declined by 1.1 percent compared with 2010, and visits to the doctor fell by 4.7 percent, the report said. Visits to the emergency room, by contrast, increased by 7.4 percent in 2011, an increase that the report's authors said was linked to the loss of health insurance resulting from long-term unemployment.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology study suggesting that more expensive hospitals in New York provided higher-quality healthcare seemed to contradict findings from the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care. Dartmouth's Jon Skinner, a researcher with the Atlas, said the two studies are looking at pretty different data. Because the MIT study looks only at data from the emergency room, it's impossible to know what happens after that initial episode of care and whether the higher spending would continue to translate into better quality. Skinner and MIT's researcher Joseph Doyle did agree on one key point: We’re not going to get better healthcare outcomes by simply throwing money at low-cost hospitals to make them high-cost hospitals.
Healthcare providers currently use a list of more than 18,000 diagnosis codes, known as International Classification of Diseases, 9th Edition (ICD-9), to bill Medicare and Medicaid. Next year, the number of codes will expand to more than 140,000, with the goal that more specific diagnoses will lead to better tracking of healthcare trends and cut down on fraud. The sheer size of ICD-9 makes it a minefield for some providers and suppliers submitting claims for payment and a potential goldmine for others. The U.S. fee-for-service model, where providers are paid by procedure, has lent itself to a type of fraud known as "upcoding," officials say. Providers use the higher-fee codes to charge the government for lower-fee procedures or, in some cases, services not rendered at all.