Analysis Of Comparative Billing Reports

It is essential for an administrator to understand how private and government payers impact actual reimbursement. Government payers have a standardized benefit structure. The one benefit is that registration staff have an easier time calculating payment due (copayments) for service and can set up payment arrangements. Since the most significant proportion of funds coming into a healthcare organization is usually payments from third-party payers, therefore, it is critical to know how each reimbursement affect the others that come in. Healthcare organization may have hundreds of different payer’s relationships in the form of different contracts that have their own rates of payment that are usually different from other payers for an identical

Since the late 1980s, Medicare has reimbursed physician services using the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (MPFS), which encompasses 10,000 procedure codes. Each code is assigned resource-based relative value units (RVUs), which are designed to reflect physician work, practice expense, and malpractice expense. To adjust for local differences in cost of living, each RVU is modified using geographic practice cost indexes (GPCIs) and then converted to dollars using a “conversion factor.” This system rewards physicians who produce a high volume of services; not surprisingly, Medicare Part B expenditures have grown rapidly.

Since 1984, Medicare patients have been serviced under the prospective payment system of the Medicare program. Under this system, primary care providers are reimbursed for their services using a fixed payment for each patient that is determined by the patient’s diagnosis-related group at the time of the admission. Therefore, under the prospective payment system a hospital’s reimbursement is unaffected by the actual expenditures that are required to care for a patient.

Internal and outside auditors have a heavy role and responsibility in performing audits, preventing major accounting errors, and following (GAAP) guidelines. Several duties comprise the role of internal and outside auditor to follow specific protocol and ensure ethical standards are priority. The National Health Care Billing Audit Guidelines are relevant to address as well as why audit failures happen. Finally, how internal vary from external audit and why audits are overall important to health care organizations. It’s vital for health care organizations to maintain all necessary standards to conduct proper audits and uphold ethical standards for the financial health of the organization.

For instance, patients will receive urgent hospital care and then will not be able to pay back their bills. Another policy affecting provider reimbursements is the change from volume-based care to value-based care. For instance, the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) have mandatory reporting guidelines that all healthcare providers have to participate in. These reports were based off volume of care (fee-for service) for the past 9 years, but due to the high costs in healthcare, the CMS is changing over to a valued based care (pay-for

Contrary to this, anecdotal reports stated that other clinicians sometimes spend more times in checking and treating patients with severe illnesses or who are in critical conditions, which made the physicians care for a greater number of patients with lower acuity. Whenever a physician and clinician bill for the same service, it is very difficult to tell if the physician saw a more complex patient. Due to these uncertainties in comparing their services, the Commission is reluctant in altering the payment differential. From that discussion, every provider must be familiar with some fundamentals about Medicare. First and foremost, there is Medicare Part A, which actually covers skilled nursing home, hospital, and home health charges; and then there is Medicare Part B, which then envelops most outpatient services, the care that patients in particular obtain from a doctor’s office (Fishman, 2002).

Both Dina Mueller and Amy Gifford will be the leads on the City’s account. Amy and Dina will complete the City’s cost report and ensure documentation and follow up compliance for the PEMT program. Jill Sangataldo will be assigned as the Billing Manager. In addition, the City of Palm Beach Gardens will need two additional full time exclusive senior billing representatives assigned to their account.

When Medicare was first established, Medicare adopted the payment methods of Blue Cross Blue Shield which meant that the program was paid hospitals on the basis of their own costs and physicians were being reimbursed by the fees that they charged which caused hospitals and physicians to provide care without boundaries (Anderson et al., 2015). This method caused Medicare to dissipate the budget that was established for beneficiaries to utilize. Now, with the ACA being implemented, Medicare had done an overhaul of payment reimbursement. Medicare is now moving toward a volume to value payment initiative that links payment to patient outcomes, experience of care, while giving providers an incentive to limit spending

Hospital reimbursement: Outline the significant components that make up the CMS IPPS (inpatient prospective payment system).

According to CMS, “Medicare created analytic files that exclude certain categories of Medicare beneficiaries to make those comparisons as meaningful as possible (CMS, 2016). Medicare also has a way to track variations in spending and use of services in different regions called Hospital Referral Region (HRR). HRR looks at where the beneficiary lives not where they go to get care. As stated by McCurdy “HRR’s generally have populations that are large enough to generate stable averages for comparisons of cost and utilization, even for narrowly defined combinations of conditions and services”. The information that Medicare collects on its beneficiaries is broad, comprehensive and from a wide-range of sources, hence, providing insight into the utilization of resources and cost differences in healthcare. Therefore, I believe it to be a reliable and valid tool to detect small variations.

Revenue determination is an important tool for health care organizations because it allows for efficient management of payment systems. This paper will look at the different components that form the payment-determination bases of revenue determination. Moreover, the difference between specific and bundled service payments will be discussed. Lastly, the three ways health care providers control their revenue function will be highlighted.

In 1998, CMS implemented a prospective payment system (PPS) for Medicare SNFs, replacing the prior fee-for-service reimbursement system.Under PPS, the Medicare program pays SNFs per day rates, which cover all routine services, ancillary services, and capital-related costs for a beneficiary's Part A stay. The program pays different rates for residents according to case-mix adjustments, which are based on residents' assessments (looking at the severity of residents' medical conditions and skilled care needs). The payment categories are called Resource Utilization Groups, or RUGs. Medicare pays

With PPS Medicare has developed diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) that groups clinical conditions together and based off the DRGs of a patient it then in turn provides a reimbursement rate to give the provider (https://www.cms.gov/Outreach-and-Education/Medicare-Learning-Network-MLN/MLNProducts/downloads/acutepaymtsysfctsht.pdf). The theory behind this style of reimbursement is that it give the hospital an incentive to efficiently treat a patient and quickly discharge the patient without wasting any unnecessary medical resources.

Medicare has changed the way it pays hospitals for services delivered to clients with Medicare. Instead of only paying for the amount of services the hospital offers, Medicare also pays hospitals for providing top quality health care services. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a federal agency that runs the Medicare program, is altering the way Medicare compensates for hospital care by giving rewards to those hospitals that delivers higher quality and higher value service to clients (Medicare.gov, n.d.). At the beginning of October 1, 2012, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) permits Medicare by reducing payments to acute care hospitals with surplus readmissions that are paid under CMS 's inpatient potential payment system (Medicare.gov, n.d.). Medicare has information regarding how the hospital 's quality care affects the disbursements it receives from Medicare. The Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) Program, created by the ACA,

The example of bill paying could include if any of those bills was actual a waste for example a magazine subscription that may not be useful. The 5’s would find waste in your hard earned money that is slowly trickling and unnecessary. The benefits of standardizing bill payments would ultimately ensure a foolproof sustainable budget.