Robert Fromberg
Editor-in-Chief
Thursday morning at HFMA's Revenue Cycle Strategies Conference, attendees were told that they needed to make a new best friend.
The opening session featured representatives of the Illinois Hospital Association, the New York State Department of Health, the Florida Hospital Association, and the Medical Information Reporting for California Project. They had a clear message for attendees: Get to know more about your quality reporting. They provided a slew of examples of present and forthcoming state and federal requirements linking quality reporting with reimbursement, not to mention health plan movement toward using quality data to determine payment. Enough to raise a CFO's blood pressure.
Kim Streit, VP of Health Care Research and Information for the Florida Hospital Association, provided this advice to financial managers:
- Become best friend with your quality staff
- Learn the measures
- Understand your data
- Implement systems to ensure accurate data reporting
- Expect health plans to use these in contracting
They cautioned, however, that you may need to make more than one phone call to meet your new best friend. In most hospitals, they said, quality reporting is done by several different departments, without clear ownership of the function.
And once you've learned more about requirements and data related to quality, financial managers need to encourage organizational investment in electronic health records, a key tool to improve data capture, analysis, and reporting, the panelists agreed.
