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eBook: The Dollars are in the Details

April 1st, 2021
April 1st, 2021

Looming changes in the healthcare landscape will significantly impact your organization’s bottom line. MACRA, readmission penalties, nurse turnover, and the status of the Affordable Care Act are all topics that keep many healthcare leaders up at night. HealthStream is proud to publish a new eBook that explores some of these issues and offer insight and best practices for navigating through the changes with success. Articles include:

CFO FORECAST: Healthcare Climate Change on the Horizon - An Interview with Joanne Acquilina, CFO, Bethesda Health

For a bird’s-eye view of the current climate and a forecast of what’s ahead, we spoke with Joanne Aquilina, CFO at Bethesda Health in South Florida. Ms. Aquilina’s point of view has been honed through more than 20 years in hospital financial management and over 10 years of public accounting. Covering a wide range of topics, she focused on several key factors affecting healthcare today and tomorrow.

Houston, We No Longer Have a Problem (When It Comes to Turnover, That Is): An Interview with Memorial Hermann’s VP of Human Resources, Lori Knowles

IN 2015, Memorial Hermann staff was working feverishly to keep up with demand for healthcare in their growing Houston service area. To accommodate the growth, Memorial Hermann was undergoing four major expansions and had two brandnew hospitals coming out of the ground. The System’s headcount was growing at 8-9% per year, which translated into a need for nearly 5,500 new employees annually. Although there was a dedicated push to hire new employees, this effort was hindered by the fact that the System had only an 85% organization-wide retention rate, with pockets of turnover at 25% among first-year nurses and in key areas such as the ED, ICU, and OR. We talked with Knowles about her successful efforts to address these challenges.

Revenue Cycle Issues, Woeful Inefficiency Make Provider Enrollment a Hot Topic

Traditionally, hospitals, healthcare organizations, and medical groups have viewed provider enrollment in health plans as a back-office function, lacking strategic importance. More recently, however, a number of changes in the industry have caused this function to be viewed in a much more important light. In this article, Echo, A HealthStream Company, and DecisionHealth present new research collected in early 2016 from nearly 300 credentialing and provider enrollment professionals about the state of their functions and place in healthcare. We think you will be surprised by some of our findings.

How St. John Providence Health System Reduced Preventable Readmissions

In 2010 the readmission rate for the health system was 25 percent, for which the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) fined the health system $2.5 million. Reducing preventable readmissions became an immediate priority. Call Center Director Mary Alice Worrell suggested a solution—that the call center pilot a Readmission Reduction program serving all member hospitals in the System. Having significantly impacted the readmission rate and fines, Worrell summarizes the outcome of this effort succinctly, sharing “Our contact center is is now respected across our enterprise as a valued resource for effectively managing readmissions and as a tool which builds trust with both patients and physicians.”

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