Hospital Access Management articles from August 2002

Hospital Access Management archives from August 2002

Outpatient registration fades away: collections are up, denials are down, registrars become financial specialists.
August 1, 2002... Shands Hospital at the University of Florida gradually is changing the face of registration and, in the process, improving the financial health of the Gainesville-based organization, says Beverly Varshovi, associate director of admissions. ...

New admissions unit targets ED overcrowding; clinical decision making to be enhanced.(emergency department)(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... Surrounded by hospitals that either are being sold or closed or are merging with other health care organizations, Swedish Covenant Hospital has become--as was stated in a recent Chicago Tribune article--"the largest stand-alone inpatient...

Don't miss opportunity with conference replay.(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... American Health Consultants is offering a replay of two of its most popular audio conferences--Avoiding Medication Errors: Saving Lives, Time, and Dollars; Put It in Writing: Keys to Effective Documentation--at the subscriber-only rate of $149...

The end of an era for outpatient registration: department at Shands closes after 30 years.(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... The end of June 2002 was the "drop-dead date" for closing down outpatient registration as it had been known at Shands Hospital for some 30 years, says Tim Carney, assistant manager of outpatient financial arrangements. The action is the...

Pros ask: where are the access benchmarks? NAHAM standards due at end of 2002.(National Association for Healthcare Access Management)
August 1, 2002... Access managers increasingly are seeking reliable benchmarks against which to measure staff productivity and revenue management achievements, saying there is little or no meaningful information available. Anxious to establish fair...

Getting paid for MRAs poses access challenge; `lack of documentation' is issue. (Access Feedback).(magnetic resonance angiography)(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... What are access managers doing to get Medicare reimbursement for magnetic resonance angiography (MRA)? That's the question that Gillian Cappiello, CHAM, director of access services at Chicago's Swedish Covenant Hospital, would like for her...

ED-to-ED transfer not always an EMTALA violation; state law must be followed, unless it conflicts. (EMTALA Q & A).(emergency department, Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act)(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... Question: Can a patient be transferred from an intensive care unit (ICU) of one hospital to the emergency department (ED) of another hospital, based on an accepting physician's request? What if the ED receiving the patient is holding patients...

Don't give up: ED copays are `built into contracts'; here's the managed care perspective.(emergency department)
August 1, 2002... (Editor's note: In this first part of a two-part series on collecting copays, we discuss how much you can collect and how to do it. Next month, we give you three tips for collecting at the end of the visit.) Many access managers who...

Court tells Medicaid it violated federal law.(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... In what appears to be a step forward in the struggle by hospitals to get paid for their services, the Maryland State Court of Appeals ruled in late June that the state's Medicaid program violated federal law by refusing to reimburse Baltimore's...

Sentinel-event cases don't just happen in ED.(emergency department)(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... While hospital emergency departments (ED) are the source of more than half of all "sentinel event" cases of patient death or permanent injury due to treatment delays, such problems can occur in any hospital unit, says the Joint Commission on...

New guide published for AHA billing project.(American Hospital Association )
August 1, 2002... Officials with the Patient-Friendly Billing project, a two-year effort aimed at making health care bills more clear, concise, correct, and patient-friendly, announced an upgrade of their web site, www.patientfriendlybilling.org. In other...