January 2019

Healthcare added more jobs than other sectors in 2018, and the growth outlook is strong

By Jeff Lagasse for Healthcare Finance By the end of the year, there were about 16 million people working in healthcare — about 11 percent of all jobs in the overall economy. A lot of jobs were created in the U.S. in 2018, and healthcare accounted for 346,000 of them, for an average of 29,000…

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How to Report Shared/Split Visits

By John Verhovshek, MA, CPC for For the Record  A “shared” or “split” patient visit occurs when both a physician and a qualified nonphysician practitioner (NPP) meet face to face with a Medicare patient on the same date of service. In other words, the work of the physician and the NPP are “combined” into a single…

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Physician burnout is a ‘public health crisis’: 3 strategies to address it

By Jessica Kim Cohen for Becker’s Hospital Review Physician burnout is a public health issue that “urgently demands action” from the rest of the healthcare industry, according to a report from Harvard University and Massachusetts trade groups. The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Harvard Global Health Institute in Cambridge, Mass., Massachusetts…

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Average hospital expenses per inpatient day across 50 states

By Ayla Ellison for Becker’s Hospital Review Below are the adjusted expenses per inpatient day in 2016, organized by hospital ownership type, in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to the latest statistics from Kaiser State Health Facts. These figures, which are based on information from the 2016 American Hospital Association Annual…

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Book excerpt: Review queries regularly to mitigate denials

By by Trey La Charité, MD, FACP, SFHM, CCDS for ACDIS CDI Blog People are human. This goes for clinicians, coders, and for CDI personnel. Mistakes happen. If left unchecked, however, mistakes become habits. Effective CDI programs understand this and take appropriate steps to ensure occasional mistakes don’t become recurring bad habits. Since the structure and…

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Billions of dollars are pouring into digital health, but Americans are still getting sicker and dying younger

By Christina Farr for CNBC Silicon Valley has spent years promising to disrupt the $3.5 trillion health-care industry. In 2018, venture investors — from the Bay Area, Boston and elsewhere — poured billions of dollars into the sector, funding start-ups that aim to bring down the costs of care while improving quality and access to…

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8 ways speech-recognition software can work for your practice

By Andis Robeznieks for American Medical Association Speech-recognition software is a tool that any size health care organization can use as part of their systematic efforts to improve the quality of the care they deliver and the experience of an office visit for patient and clinician alike. So say two physicians who helped to implement…

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Patient dies hours after being turned away from Wisconsin hospital

By Megan Knowles for Becker’s Hospital Review  A patient at a Franklin, Wis., hospital died of heart disease hours after being sent home to wait for a bed to be freed up for him, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The patient, 46-year-old Spendi Rusitovski, visited the Ascension Southeast Wisconsin hospital Dec. 17 with chest pains. The…

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