Aquina Blog

According to Donald Trump, the Trump Plan will lower the business tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent, and eliminate the corporate alternative minimum tax. This rate is available to all businesses, both small and large, that want to retain the profits within the business.

As stated on The Balance, Section 179 of the IRS Code was enacted to help small businesses by allowing them to take a depreciation deduction for certain assets (capital expenditures) in one year, rather than depreciating them over a longer period of time. Taking a deduction on an asset in its first year is called a "Section 179 deduction." You can see that there is a benefit to taking the full deduction for the cost of the item immediately, rather than being required to spread out the deduction over the item's useful life.

According to Healthcare IT News, the year ahead holds both opportunity and uncertainty, the consulting firm noted, with the Affordable Care Act’s fate coming into question as healthcare organizations move into the new world of value-based care and other advances.

As stated in the Harvard Business Review, As payers and providers in the U.S. health care system shift from fee for service to value-based approaches that pay providers for quality, they are turning to two models: One is procedure- and DRG-based bundled payments that pay one price for all the care related to treating a condition. The other is population-based “global” or “capitated” payments” such as accountable care organizations in which a provider is paid a fixed amount to cover all of a patient’s health needs for a specified period of time. The Center for Orthopedic Research and Education (or CORE Institute) — a group of musculoskeletal, neurologic, and rehabilitative physicians in Arizona and Michigan that includes orthopedic, spine, and pain-management physicians and a number of other types of clinicians — is pioneering an approach that represents a middle ground. It addresses a central criticism of bundled payments: that the approach doesn’t prevent unnecessary care.

Recently published in Healthcare Informatics, A new report from Deloitte found that the healthcare and life sciences industries have the most aggressive blockchain deployment plans of any sector, with 35 percent of surveyed respondents saying that their company plans to deploy the technology in production within the next calendar year.

According to Modern Healthcare, When St. Luke's University Health Network implemented bundled payments for 84 services under Medicare's voluntary bundled-payment program, system leaders knew they needed to whittle down the list of preferred post-acute providers to improve outcomes and save costs.

According to Forbes, the holiday rush can be a stressful time for small business retailers. Owners have to account for staffing issues, lack of capital, inventory, opening another location, boosting advertising, and insufficient personal time. Amidst the shopping, box office blockbusters and holiday cheer, retailers with fewer than 100 employees were surveyed to gauge their outlook for the holiday season.

An informative article published in Capture Billing states, patients are more in control of the patient-doctor relationship than ever before. The proliferation of third-party healthcare websites, including numerous sites dedicated to reviewing doctors and medical practices, opens up patients to a wealth of new information once restricted only to conversations with their doctor.

According to The Atlantic, Hospital patients are attacking staff at an alarming rate, and there are no federal regulations requiring employers to provide any protection.

Recently published in Forbes, it used to be that hospitals billed Medicare for the services they provided, and Medicare–I know this is crazy!–simply paid the bills.