The Pulse:
Healthcare Technology Blog
Our COVID-19 Blog Posts
Successful Provider Onboarding in Stressful Times
As healthcare organizations scramble to meet the immediate demands of the coronavirus pandemic, rapid onboarding of new providers is a pressing need. While the urgency of this moment is...
COVID-19 and Expedited Credentialing Procedures
Credentialing in Privileging and Enrollment Credentialing is the first of many quality governance procedures that hospitals and health plans implement to mitigate financial and legal risks...
Crisis Analytics for Healthcare Organizations: How to Quickly Identify and Act on Force Majeure Language or Its Absence
The deeply earned recognition of healthcare workers as frontline heroes in the fight against COVID-19 has not immunized them or their employers against the threat of financial ruin. Healthcare...
Regulatory reform, market trends, supplier news. Recalls and new product introductions. Notable quotables and high-profile executive moves. Read up on developments from the supply chain to the legal department.
Limitations of Manual Contract Management
Most people wouldn’t dream of using a card catalog to access a library book. Those index cards were replaced long ago by digital, searchable catalogs that make it much quicker and easier to locate a book across multiple library branches. And, in this digital...
Remote-Based Tools: Essential to Optimizing the Business of Healthcare
As I sit here in San Francisco, drinking tea and looking around my new office space — a recently converted walk-in closet — I reflect on the trials and tribulations of working from home. Like many employees across the country, my transition to remote-based employment...
The Importance of Contract Request Management
Contracts are the lifeblood of any organization, especially in the healthcare arena. So, how does a contract come to life? In these times of tight budgets, it’s all the more important to know which equipment and services require a contract and to take care that...
The Advantages of Partnering with a Full-Service Credentials Verification Organization (CVO)
Manually enrolling a single provider in a health plan can take anywhere from 3 months to 12 months.Provider credentialing—establishing that providers are appropriately trained and competent to care for patients—is a time-consuming process that is highly regulated at...
Centralize, Standardize, and Optimize Your Healthcare Contracting Processes
Do you struggle to locate important contracts in filing cabinets spread throughout your health system?How often do contracts get stuck on someone’s desk, waiting for approval? If you were audited right now, would your contracts be compliant? Many healthcare...
Understand the Top 3 Basic Agreement Types and How They Impact Your Healthcare Organization
Strategic sourcing and contract lifecycle management are the lifeblood of a healthcare organization.Efficient contracting ensures that frontline providers have immediate and adequate access to the therapies, supplies, and ancillary services needed to...
Prevent Surprise Billing Through an Efficient Provider Enrollment Process
When it comes to medical bills, no one likes surprises. Surprise medical bills occur when patients are treated by out-of-network providers under unavoidable circumstances. For example, patients having surgery at an in-network hospital performed by an in-network...
Value-Based Payments: How Physicians Are Adapting
To succeed within value-based payment models, primary care physicians (PCPs) must change the way they manage not only their patients but also their practices. Because value-based payment models take complete episodes of care into account as opposed to discrete...
Bringing Clinicians to the Supply Chain Discussion
Students go to medical school to learn medicine and how to provide the best care for their patients. No medical student has ever asked the dean to consider adding a few courses on supply chain management to the curriculum. Yet the input of clinicians is crucial...
Delegated Credentialing Expedites Provider Enrollment
Manually enrolling a single provider in a health plan can take anywhere from 3 months to 12 months. Delays in provider enrollment are extremely costly. Every month enrollment is delayed, physician practice groups and health systems lose an average of $100,000...
Negotiating Blood Services Contracts
Purchasing blood has become more challenging than ever, due to supplier consolidations and shortages of platelets and rare blood types. As a result, skillful negotiation of blood service contracts is essential to meeting your health system’s needs...
Do Choice and Pricing Transparency Lead to Better Healthcare?
In November 2019, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) published Price Transparency Requirements for Hospitals to Make Standard Charges Public Final Rule (the Final Rule, effective January 1, 2021). According to CMS, the current lack of...
Top Four Ways to Improve Physician Engagement
Physician burnout is on the rise. Regulatory red tape, concerns about reimbursement, and the sheer amount of paperwork and data entry required to get through any given day have taken a toll on physicians. In one survey of 400 physicians, most respondents (89...
Exact Match: How to Mitigate Medicare Claim Denials
Better start making your list and checking it twice.No, we’re not suggesting you become Santa Claus. We’re referring to checking your Medicare Provider Enrollment, Chain, and Ownership System (PECOS) enrollment file to be sure your off-campus provider-based service...
Cleaning Up Your Linen Services Contracts
Perhaps this scenario sounds familiar: You’re about to leave the office and get a head start on the weekend when your VP of Facilities calls. The linen truck was late again and delivered only half the order this morning, so another vendor had to be called to...
The Ups and Downs of Negotiating Elevator Services Contracts
When most people think of going to a hospital, the last thing on their mind is whether the elevators are properly maintained. Truth be told, though, keeping your elevators running smoothly is crucial for the safety of patients, staff, and visitors, as well...
Learning to Talk Trash: How to Negotiate Better Waste Management Contracts
Hospitals spend an average of $700 per bed annually on waste management services. But let’s face it—some waste management agreements are just garbage. Here are some down and dirty tips and tricks to help you clean up in Waste Management negotiations. Don’t...
Technology Continues to Drive the Evolution in Healthcare
A recent article in Becker’s Health IT & CIO Report pointed to some of the dramatic changes that technology will drive as the nation’s healthcare organizations evolve. Titled “15 things health systems do today that will become obsolete due to technology,” the...
Automation and Integration: Doing More with Less
Healthcare lags behind other industries when it comes to automation and integration. Provider credentialing, privileging, and enrollment are typically manual, paper-based processes. Providers complete and sign hard copies of application forms that must be sent...
Coronavirus’s Potential To Change Healthcare Supply Chains Forever
Coronavirus has already taken a mighty toll on stock markets around the world. But there’s another market that is under attack from this respiratory disease: the healthcare supply chain. We’re all familiar with the run on face masks and hand sanitizers, but the...
Healthcare Consolidations: Do they foster increased efficiency and improved care?
As healthcare systems continue to become more complex, they face intense cost pressures. They need to remain financially viable while continuing to provide high-quality care to patients and achieving operational efficiency. When the Affordable Care Act (ACA)...
Slip Slidin’ Away – the i-STAT Debacle
On the morning of January 15, 2020, the grip on the point-of-care market enjoyed by the Abbott i-STAT system began a free fall that could cause permanent pain for the flagship analyzer in this market. Customers had no advance notice of the debacle, and many...
Hospitals are Investing in Financial Decision Support Tools
As healthcare continues to move toward data-driven decision-making on all fronts, hospital operations and business processes are no exception to this trend. The industry is shifting to value-based payments and episode-based payments, and hospitals and health...
The Promise of Bioresorbable Magnesium Scaffold Stents
The first bioresorbable vascular scaffold (BVS) stent to enter the market was Abbott’s ABSORB A drug-eluting polymer stent that received CE Mark approval in 2011 and FDA approval in 2016. However, this was a short-lived stent, and Abbott ended U.S. sales in...
Value-Based Payments 101: Aims to Provide Better Healthcare for Individuals, Improved Population Health, and Lower Costs.
One of the most interesting recent changes in today’s healthcare market is the shift to value-based payments. Depending on your role within your healthcare organization, you may not know the meaning of that term. If so, this article is for you! If you're already...
Advancements in Endoscopy
The method is considered minimally invasive; when compared to open procedures, it results in smaller incisions, less bleeding, shorter recovery time, and less post-operative pain. Contrasted with rigid procedures, flexible endoscopy is performed via access to natural...
Capital Negotiations: A Three-Tiered Approach
So, you received your MD Buyline Quote Analysis, and we recommend further discussion with the vendor prior to making a purchase decision for your organization. Now what? Negotiating with vendors can be intimidating, daunting, and stressful. However, a...
Monitoring – It’s Not Just for the Hospital Anymore!
Anytime we come into contact with healthcare, we will most likely encounter some type of patient monitor. Whether it is a basic vital signs monitor at the physician’s office or a multi-parameter, full-screen monitor in the Intensive Care Unit, physiologic...
The Invisible Impact of Credentialing – Part Two
Make Sure All Data is Protected – Not Just PHI. More than two decades ago, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was signed into law. One of its most significant provisions was to create a standard method of protecting patient data,...
New Hospital Price Transparency Rule: Will It Really Help Healthcare Consumers?
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has instituted a new hospital price transparency rule. In an effort to lower the costs of one of the major components of healthcare, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has instituted a new hospital...
The Invisible Impact of Credentialing – Part One
The past 8 to 10 years have been transformative in the “business” of providing healthcare. The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (aka ARRA, aka Stimulus Program) brought with it unprecedented incentives for healthcare providers to widely adopt...
Usher in the Era of Collaboration
Collaboration with others leads to all success, whether producing innovation, growing a business, or reducing costs. While people talk about how collaboration is the key to success, one question comes to mind: How do you make cross-departmental collaboration occur...
Maintenance Agreements 101: Key Points for Initial Navigation
Healthcare organizations tend to classify capital equipment service contracts into different categories. Service contracts may be the responsibility of the purchased services team or of the capital procurement team, or have their own division within the Supply...
Healthcare M&A: Focus on Synergies, Not the Pain Points
Mergers & Acquisitions have altered the healthcare landscape dramatically over the past decade, and the activity continues to accelerate and evolve. M&A in healthcare has become an essential reality with the transition to value-based care, and Supply Chain...
Advancements and Concerns in Healthcare Voice Recognition Technology
A major concern of the medical industry throughout its history has been the documentation of patient encounters in a timely fashion while maintaining patient privacy and confidentiality. Medical dictation and transcription technologies have traditionally been integral...
Billing Begins with Insurance and Provider Enrollment Verification
Insurance verification plays an important role in a practice’s revenue cycle management efforts. When verifications are not managed properly, lost revenue can be significant. In addition to the provider’s time, other investments are at risk of being written off when a...
Re-Defining Physician Credentialing Management Strategies
Increased M&A activity and physician alignment strategies has caused an unprecedented increase in physician on-boarding. Current physician credentialing management strategies are not equipped to handle this volume and require a shift from a “one to many”...
Credentialing Challenges and Opportunities for Physician Practices
Patrick Doyle, Newport VP of Business Development shares the credentialing challenges and opportunities of Physician Practices and the newly formed state and federal exchange plans. Q. How does the addition of new state and federal exchange plans challenge your...
Establishing a Governance Committee is Like Building a Winning Football Team.
Healthcare contracting isn’t a game, and the stakes are a whole lot higher, but creating a successful contract management program is a bit like building a winning football program. Strategy is essential, and you have to follow the rules to avoid penalties. To build an...
Hidden Ways Hospitals Can Save Money
2017 is predicted to be a challenging year for health systems and hospitals around the country, according to a recent blog post by Deloitte. Increased financial pressures are expected due to changes to the payer mix, the move towards value-based care and uncertainty...
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