Aquina Blog

Recent changes in the Affordable Health Care Act have made it so that every American has access to professional medical care. With the health care reform in full effect, every American citizen is eligible for health care and must buy into the market due to binding laws. Many people are choosing high deductible plans, which will have a big impact on medical providers in the early part of each calendar year. As the new year starts, patients will be responsible for a larger portion of their healthcare costs, putting strain on physicians and other medical providers who will need to collect these payments from their patients. Small businesses in the healthcare sector will need to stockpile working capital for the start of the year to manage through this difficult period.

An emerging issue that is quickly becoming one of the largest challenges for hospitals is how they can avoid patients being readmitted into the hospital repeatedly. With the implement of the Affordable Health Care Act hospitals can be penalized 3 percent on their Medicare health reimbursements if patients are readmitted within 30 days of being discharged. One of the keys to reducing readmission rates is for home healthcare agencies to provide effective post-hospital treatment to patients. Hospitals are gearing up to measure the success of the home health agencies that are treating their patients after discharge. Hospitals are taking great notice of this for cost effective purposes, home health agencies should take notice because they can be referred to by the hospital as the post-discharge provider for the patients coming out.

Whether you are ready or not, ICD-10 is here and it is set. Successful ICD-10 management relies on a few things. There is no grace period and as of October 1, 2015, it is a ready-or-not situation for healthcare offices and businesses. This is why it is essential to ensure you are prepared. ICD-10 is set to expand the total number of claim codes from about 17,000 to more than 140,000. The purpose of this change is to create a more detailed, accurate recording of what services are actually given.

After years of discussion and much deliberation small healthcare businesses are finally grappling with ICD-10 concerns as it finally arrived October 1st, 2015. From this date, it is mandatory for all healthcare establishments to use this new arrangement of codes.

On October 1st, the healthcare industry will go through the first large scale coding change in over 30 years with the implementation of ICD-10. This change is broad and will impact medical providers across all disciplines and business sizes. This could lead to a slowdown in payments as providers, billers, and insurance companies adjust to the new coding requirements. Medical providers need to insure they have enough cash available to cover operating expenses for their business in the event that ICD-10 leads to cash flow disruptions.