Healthcare Financial News

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has awarded nearly $3 million for a contract to help reduce central line-associated bloodstream infections in hospital intensive care units (ICUs) by spreading the knowledge gained from a previous AHRQ-funded project. The new three-year project is part of an AHRQ initiative to reduce healthcare-associated infections.

The comprehensive program, designed to survey and improve an ICU’s patient safety culture, includes tools to help healthcare professionals identify opportunities to reduce potential healthcare-associated infections and implement policies to make care safer. Within three months of implementation in Michigan, the program helped reduce infection rates to zero in more than 50 percent of participating hospitals. Read the press release.

The federal government allocated $2.56 trillion in domestic spending for FY07, up 4.4 percent from 2006, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. This and additional information on federal funding is included in two new reports being released today. Consolidated Federal Funds Report: 2007 provides a broad overview of how and where the federal government distributes funds. Statistics are broken out by federal department and agency, as well as by state, county, and subcounty area. Federal Aid to States for Fiscal Year 2007 contains data on federal grants to state and local governments.

Retirement and disability payments to individuals accounted for $783 billion (more than 30 percent) of total federal spending. Of that amount, 80 percent, or $623 billion, went to Social Security recipients. Nearly half of all domestic government spending (excluding interest on the federal debt) went to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, accounting for $1.22 trillion. The one-year increase in spending for these three programs was approximately $198 for every person in the United States.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) yesterday announced that, beginning Oct. 1, 2008, it will publish most of the edits used in its Medically Unlikely Edit (MUE) program to improve the accuracy of claims payments. The Oct. 1, 2008, version of MUE was to contain edits for about 9,700 HCPCS/CPT codes that have been assigned unit values for MUEs. The edits are published on the CMS web site.

CMS established the MUE program to reduce payment errors for Medicare Part B claims. Claims processing contractors use these edits to ensure that providers and suppliers do not report excessive services; the edits are applied during the electronic processing of all claims. Studies have identified significant Medicare overpayments because provider or supplier claims sometimes report services with too many units of service. These errors may be caused by numerous factors, including clerical or coding errors. Read the press release.