Curious about PRN Funding’s healthcare factoring services?
Check out our 2012 Trade Show schedule. We’d love to see you if you’re planning on attending any of the shows below:
| Trade Show | Location | Dates | Booth # |
| NAHC Leadership Summit | Las Vegas, NV | Jan 23-25 | 303 |
| ACE12 | Indianapolis, IN | Aug 8-11 | 108 |
| NPDA | Orlando, FL | Sept 12-14 | TBD |
| Decision Health | Las Vegas, NV | Nov 2-4 | TBD |
Changes in healthcare are taking place all throughout the country, including the home. According to Healthcare Finance News, The Alliance for Quality Home Care (AQHC) recently outlined its new policy on post-acute healthcare reform. Post-acute healthcare refers to home care that people receive when they are not sick enough to be in the hospital, but need medical attention and help with daily activities. The AQHC outlined three main objectives of their plan:
Patient Needs First: The needs of patients must be the driver of reform. The reform is intended to integrate systems and put all people involved in home care on the same page with aligned incentives, rather than mixed incentives, in order to match each patient individually with their needs.
Payment Tied to Quality: Performance metrics must be developed that better apply across all care sectors, and also keep the “big picture” of total care in mind to see how each caregiver is performing in context. High performers get compensated for their work, which will encourage only the best care.
Adequate Payment: While not easy to accomplish in times of budget cuts, with the proper structure in place adequate compensation can be given. This requires looking at situations that providers face and making cuts accordingly, not across the board.
For the full article, see Nursing Home Alliance Offers Post-Acute System Reform
There was another interesting article from HealthLeaders Media that the nurse staffing factoring specialists at PRN Funding felt would be beneficial for our nurse staffing friends to read. Entitled Nurse Staffing Costs Must Be Weighed Against the Cost of Errors, the article author believes that hospital executives need to pay closer attention to studies that show how nurse staffing affects a hospital’s overall performance and base staffing decisions on those findings.
Kathy Douglas, MHA, RN, president of the Institute for Staffing Excellence and Innovation, CNO of API Healthcare, and a board member of the journal Nursing Economic$ was quoted in the article saying: “Staffing costs sit in one part of the budget, so we think of the results there. Then the cost of errors sits in another part of the budget. If I could say one thing to healthcare executives it is to make staffing a top strategic priority in your organization. If you look at top priorities-LOS, safety, quality-all of these things have direct links to staffing.”
Moreover, Douglas gave an example of looking at things from a bigger perspective. She said that some hospitals that have cut back on staffing may not notice that it is overusing overtime and it might not notice that there’s a relationship between the overtime and the number if infections on a unit.
According to the ADVANCE Perspective HIM Blog, the American Academy of Professional Coders, a trade association dedicated to serving the medical coding industry, recently created an ICD-10 resource site in preparation for the government’s mandated ICD-10 changeover in October 2013.
ICD-10 is expected to affect all heathcare professionals, not just the administrative medical coders and medical billing staff.
Among the key features include:
For further information about ICD-10 implementation, please visit the AAPC ICD-10 site.
Advance Perspective’s HIM Blog recently re-posted a blog post by Don Fornes of EHR Software Advice, in which he discussed the ever-changing eletronic health record (EHR) market and how it’s impacting vendors’ cash flow. The medical transcription factoring specialists and medical billing and coding invoice funding specialists at PRN Funding took the liberty of summarizing the bulk of the post below:
In a nutshell, Fornes’ article talked about how most people would think that the Federal subsidies for EHR implementation would create a massive boom for EHR software industry, however, this concept couldn’t be further from the truth. Based on the data points that Fornes has observed over the past few months, he thinks that most EHR software vendors are actually experiencing a cash flow crunch.
According to Fornes, these EHR software vendors have been pouring cash into marketing and brand awareness initiatives to remain top-of-mind for physicians’ practices and medical facilities, however, most providers have taken a “wait-and-see” approach to EHR adoption.
Couple these two scenarios with the increasing shift for the software industry as a whole to shift to cloud computing because of low monthly pricing.
As a result of EHR vendors investing a lot of money into their business expansion, providers writing fewer checks than anticipated and the checks that are written are much smaller and more spread out, a difficult cash flow scenario has been playing out for a number of vendors. Fornes commented how he’s seen “some EHR vendors stretching their payables out 90 or even 120 days.”
Overall, it was a very informative article, however, what Fornes left out what that EHR vendors have the ability to drastically improve their cash flow by factoring their invoices. For example, an EHR vendor could sell its invoices to PRN Funding and receive cash the same day.
Click here to read Fornes’ original blog post.
Robert N. Mitchell wrote an interesting article in the November 8th edition of For the Record Magazine in which he discussed the rise of mobile dictation in the healthcare industry.
With the government urging HIT adoption, there’s been a gradual change in physician documentation habits. Moreover, physicians are being asked more frequently to use electronic health records (EHR) instead of narrative dictation to dictate. However, using an EHR takes twice as long to accomplish because physicians have to “leave the exam room, find a computer, log in to it, load an application, search for the patient, find a template, fill out the template–all the while hoping that the template covers all the information that has to be documented.”
Some physicians combat the lag time by taking notes and entering all of the day’s the information into EHRs at the end of the day. However, when this is done from memory, it increases the risk of incomplete or inaccurate EHRs. Enter mobile dictation apps.
Good Shepherd Medical Center (Longview, TX) recently developed an iPhone app for its physicians to view patients’ clinical and demographic information. Using the app allows doctors to “see which patients need attention and to view lab values, medication lists and radiology reports” all from their smart phone.
3M Health Information Systems developed a mobile app that interfaces with scheduling systems and patient admissions, discharge and transfer systems. Doctors can use their app to “dictate notes, view patient lists…and access current patient information.” In addition, 3M’s app allows physicians to dictate directly into a smartphone during a patient encounter. The completed dictation is then automatically sent for speech recognition and then into the medical transcription system.
Emdat has also developed an app that allow doctors to download their patient schedule and record their dictation directly into an iPhone and/or Windows Mobile platforms. In addition, physicians can review the completed dictation and use electronic signatures from their mobile devices.
Finally, BayScribe has developed mobile dictation apps for the iPhone (both 3 and 4), iPad, Windows Mobile devices, and Blackberry, and Android is on its way.
BayScribe’s IT manager Dean Ganskop, said: “This takes an entire narrative from a doctor and the engine parses out discrete reportable transcription [DRT] information such as allergies or diagnosis list.”
As exciting as these new mobile dictation technologies are, Claudia Tessier (RHIA, MEd, president of mHealth Initiative and former CEO of the American Association for Medical Transcription) insists that the need to review a dictated report will never go away.
Q: What do you think about mobile dictation devices?
CDC analyzed data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) for 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and early release NHIS data from the first quarter 2010 to help determine the number of uninsured Americans or who had gaps in coverage. Then CDC used their findings to determine whether lack of health insurance coverage was associated with increased levels of forgone health care. Here are some of it’s key findings:
CDC also concluded that Americans aged 18-64 with chronic medical conditions and without consistent health insurance coverage are much more likely to forgo needed medical care than those with the same conditions and continuous coverage. In addition, CDC said: “Increasing the number of persons with continuous health insurance coverage can reduce the number of occasions that persons forgo needed health care, which can reduce complications from illness and avoidable long-term expenditures.”
Click here to read more from CDC’s report on Health Insurance Coverage and Health Care Utilization.
Last week, the medical transcription invoice funding specialists at PRN Funding blogged about CBaySystem’s IPO. Since then, we learned more details on the company’s plan to go public.
As part of CBaySystems’ IPO, the MT company filed an S-1 Form with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In it, CBaySytems shared a number of fascinating facts about the company as well as unique insights into the clinical documentation industry as a whole.
CBaySystems is the “leading provider of integrated clinical documentation solutions for the U.S. healthcare system.” The following CBaySystems statistics were calculated over a three-month time-span which ended on June 30, 2010:
Furthermore, the S-1 Form shared a number of interesting facts about the medical transcription and clinical documentation industry, courtesy of research conducted by ValueNotes Database Pvt. Ltd (ValueNotes). Below of some of the market research firm’s key findings:
Click here to read the entire CBaySystems’ S-1 Form.
Nuance Communications (the maker of speech-recognition software) made an announcement today that it has entered into a new collaboration with IBM.
According to an article on the HealthcareIT News web site, “the two companies aim to help advance the state-of-the-art in clinical language understanding (CLU) technologies.” Moreover, a team of leading natural language processing (NLP) researchers at IBM will collaborate with Nuance’s research and development team to integrate the their technologies.
The vice president of software in IBM Research, Charles Lickel, was quoted in the article: “With Nuance, we’ll work to ensure healthcare organizations can gain access to, and classify health data to improve patient outcomes and to help lower the cost of healthcare today.”
The U.S. Institute of Medicine and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation released a report stating that nurses have the capability to handle “much of the strain that healthcare reform will place on doctors and should be given both the education and the authority to take on more medical duties.”
The report suggests that the U.S. Government and non-profit organizations should fund grants and scholarships to allow nurses to further their educations so they can take on bigger responsibilities.
Q: If nurses are pulled away from their nursing responsibilities and asked to take on more doctor-like ones, it may help with the physician shortage. However, who will step up to help fill the gaps with the nursing shortage?
Click here to read the entire article: Doctor shortage looming? Use nurses, US report says.
