Cost Effectiveness of Health Articles

Higher bed counts, fewer primary care physicians and investor ownership are among the characteristics of health systems that tend to overuse healthcare, according to a new study.

In the past year, Americans have witnessed two extremes of the FDA’s accelerated approval process, exposing both profound strengths and worrisome weaknesses. Finance leaders should keep informed about new drug treatment options, their associated costs and efficacy and whether lower-cost alternatives that have the same efficacy are available so they can engage in meaningful conversations with clinicians about which options truly promote cost effectiveness of health.

HFMA President and CEO Joe Fifer interviews Paul Keckley, managing editor of The Keckley Report and author of an upcoming column in hfm magazine about the economy and healthcare spending, public health and the pandemic, and the cost effectiveness of health.

HFMA's award-winning editorial team looks back on key stories from 2021 in the news, hfm magazine, HFMA's Community, the podcast and more.

To maintain a high-quality workforce, hospitals and health systems must take deliberate steps to address common pitfalls in the recruiting process and to adopt proven strategies for enhancing retention.

Despite the havoc the COVID-19 pandemic created for hospitals, it also created an opportunity for many important lessons learned on how care can be delivered more efficiently and cost effectively in patients’ homes.

Increasing health expenditures and the pressures of the recent pandemic have contributed to the development of a new type of center of excellence (COE), called the future-state COE, which is designed to better address the needs of large employers. This COE model incorporates value-based contracting and a strong incentive design into a service-line strategy to create employee health programs that benefit employers, patients and providers alike.

Research into the costs of delivering telehealth versus in-person visits by the Department of Orthopaedics at Penn Medicine sought to answer the health systems’ questions about the long-term economic viability of telemedicine services, and to help inform their conversations with payers about how much they should appropriately be paid for the services.

Two leaders of health system hospital-at-home programs describe how the acute hospital care at home model represents an important change in how our nation approaches healthcare delivery, because it has been shown to yield improved care outcomes and greater patient satisfaction.

Healthcare organizations can best prepare for an anticipated labor shortage and other workforce challenges by adopting a holistic and proactive approach to human capital management as a discipline, with the goal of promoting greater employee engagement and satisfaction.