A recent survey by HFMA and Strata found that while 85% of health systems and 57% of hospitals and medical centers have a cost accounting system, most do not have strong proficiency in using cost data to reduce total cost of care.
Hfma Introduction To Hospital Accounting Answer Key.rarl
For a field in which high cost is an overarching problem, the absence of accurate cost information in health care is nothing short of astounding. Few clinicians have any knowledge of what each component of care costs, much less how costs relate to the outcomes achieved. In most health care organizations there is virtually no accurate information on the cost of the full cycle of care for a patient with a particular medical condition. Instead, most hospital cost-accounting systems are department-based, not patient-based, and designed for billing of transactions reimbursed under fee-for-service contracts. In a world where fees just keep going up, that makes sense. Existing systems are also fine for overall department budgeting, but they provide only crude and misleading estimates of actual costs of service for individual patients and conditions. For example, cost allocations are often based on charges, not actual costs. As health care providers come under increasing pressure to lower costs and report outcomes, the existing systems are wholly inadequate.
Health care delivery remains heavily local, and even academic medical centers primarily serve their immediate geographic areas. If value is to be substantially increased on a large scale, however, superior providers for particular medical conditions need to serve far more patients and extend their reach through the strategic expansion of excellent IPUs. Buying full-service hospitals or practices in new geographic areas is rarely the answer. Geographic expansion should focus on improving value, not just increasing volume.
The pandemic caused a quick shift to remote work, off-cycle code changes and additions, and other disruptions to normal workflows. Most in the industry agree that those rapid shifts are going to continue. As a result, medical coding requires vigorous, continued training, financed by the employer. Coders learn to quickly adapt to these changes, furthering their skills and expertise. This leads experienced coders to seek appropriate compensation for their work. The caveat is that this comes at a time when hospital leadership is looking for ways to reduce overhead, and, with administrative and revenue cycle tasks accounting for up to 25% of healthcare spending, medical coding is often at the top of the list when redlining budgets.
U.S. hospitals spend more than one trillion dollars on annual operating expenses, with purchased services accounting for 34.8 percent of non-direct labor spend over the last 18 months, according to Conductiv data. 2ff7e9595c
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