Some Hospitals Get the Triple Whammy.

It can’t be easy to be a hospital administrator nowadays. It probably never was. It has always been a delicate balance to juggle dealing with the feelings and physical needs of the sick and their families, courting professional staff members, the business priorities of the community, the never ending march of new technologies, the ever-present possibility of malpractice suits, labor and staffing issues, competition from other hospitals, the spiraling costs of healthcare, and more recently the expanding expectation of transparency and measurable outcomes. There are few industries subject to as much regulation and oversight as the hospital industry. With the authority of the federal government behind it, Medicare– whose lead is followed by much of the private-payer world– is arguably the regulator-in-chief and is increasingly more willing to use its control of the purse strings to advance public health policy priorities. Highly visible in the last three years are Medicare programs that seek to change the metric for payment of hospitals from paying for volume and procedures to quality, value, and desirable health outcomes. Measurement of these latter is now being tied to Medicare hospital payments. Continue reading “All But 2 Kentucky Hospitals Receive Medicare Penalties for Quality.”