Category: Medicare

Medicare Payments to Physicians Now Available On-Line.

Take a look at the results for Louisville and Kentucky.

Our colleague Terry Boyd at Insider Louisville was probably the first out of the block this morning to report on the local results of the much-debated, long-opposed, and likely system-changing publication by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services of the amounts of money charged by and payed to individual physicians and other providers for some Medicare patients. This previously top-secret financial and utilization information had not even been available to other physicians let alone the public.

Long opposed by organized medicine as a violation of individual physician privacy, the public has gotten used to, indeed gained an appetite for such information about hospitals, nursing homes and the like. This is part of the movement to increase medical safety, quality, and efficiency. It also has been very helpful for identifying medical fraud and abuse. I predict that the release of physician payment data will have as much earth-shaking effect as last year’s release of hospital payment data illustrated by the now-famous article in Time Magazine, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” by Steven Brill.

There will be much to learn from this extensive database. It is huge! My tricked-out Mac chokes on the size of it. You can look up individual physicians for a more detailed breakdown on the Washington Post Portal referred to by Terry Boyd, or the Wall Street Journal..  To give the community something to look at while I do the same, a more manageable aggregate list of all the physician and other non-hospital Medicare providers doing business in Louisville or the state of Kentucky is available below.  I have ranked the lists by the amount of money actually paid to individual providers– highest paid providers are at the top. Definitions of the individual items and some other comments about the data are present in the designated tabs. Continue reading “Medicare Payments to Physicians Now Available On-Line.”

Third Meeting of UofL Hospital Operations Review Committee.

Finally some real data.

On April 5, the Ad Hoc Operations review committee of University Medical Center, Inc. (UMC) met for the third time. This was the first meeting in which substantive analysis was presented by the consultants of Dixon Hughes Goodman. Unfortunately, Committee attendance continues to dwindle. Only five of the 10 committee members attended, one of those by telephone. In the peanut public gallery were myself, reporter Patrick Howington, and someone from Brown-Forman. One additional meeting before a final meeting on May 9 is planned.

The entirety of the meeting was a PowerPoint presentation by the consultants with only a few questions and comments from committee members. No handouts were presented as the material was said to be a work in progress. I could not help but suspect there was also some desire that the information not be disseminated. Indeed, most of the data presented must have been disappointing to the University. In any event, I photographed the projected slides and they are available here.

Senior consultant Craig Anderson, Sr. gave an update on the status of the project and lead his team of two additional people through a brief review of the challenges facing all academic medical centers (AMCs), some themes and observations from initial interviews with Hospital and University personnel, and some initial data addressing four of the hypotheses to be tested: lack of physician alignment, quality of clinical care and operations, payer environment, and facility constraints. Continue reading “Third Meeting of UofL Hospital Operations Review Committee.”

How does UofL hospital compare to other hospitals?

Let’s look at some numbers.

The University of Louisville is going to try and make a case that it has unique requirements that will require additional non-patient revenue to fix. Specifically, they are asking for more state money, or alternatively, permission to partner with an outside business entity that is willing to give them more money. The claim will be made they are caring for a disproportionate share of nonpaying patients, and do not have enough profitable patients to subsidize the losses the way other hospitals do. This is a reasonable argument to make but it is an incomplete one. The University’s problem will not be fixed by money alone. There are a host of other issues that must be addressed simultaneously. I have begun to discuss these elsewhere.

There are 3502 acute care hospitals that participate in the Medicare program. Of these, 1047 are teaching hospitals, and 601 are large urban teaching hospitals like the University of Louisville Hospital. It would be easy for the University or its consultants to pick and choose hospitals to compare with that would bolster its case. Picking your own benchmarks is one way to make yourself look good, or in this case bad. Much of the University’s credibility will hinge on the choice of comparable institutions. Fortunately, there is an ocean of comparative data available that I believe helps put things in perspective and can provide a starting point for a broad-based study of our medical school and its principal teaching hospital. I will try to present such information on the Institute’s website. Such analysis often challenges popular wisdom.

For example, teaching hospitals get billions of dollars of special funding from Medicare (and Medicaid) solely because they have medical residents on their wards. These Direct and Indirect payments for Graduate Medical Education (interns and residents) increased substantially over the years as a result of effective lobbying. It was argued from the start that teaching hospitals deserve more money because they have extra expenses related to faculty salary, inefficiencies of care, and for other reasons that may or may not be relevant today. Federal analysts estimate that Medicare pays teaching hospitals twice as much for graduate medical education than the actual cost of those programs to the hospitals. Not to be denied, the teaching hospital lobby continues to argue that they are entitled to the extra money because of their disproportionate service to the poor. Is it in fact true that teaching hospitals take care of more of the poor than non-teaching hospitals? I was frankly surprised when my first attempt to find out showed that in fact, the proposition does not appear to be true. Continue reading “How does UofL hospital compare to other hospitals?”