by Nick Jacobs

Periodically, I write about articles that have appeared in Modern Healthcare; one of my favorite writers is Charles Lauer, former VP- publishing and editorial director of the magazine. The sweet irony of his most recent article, "Growing Evidence, Studies show the therapeutic value of healing gardens" was difficult for me to express.

Read more!

AHA launched a new site Hospital Relief Efforts - other hospitals around the nation can use this site to offer up personnal and supplies. (Hat tip: MSSP Nexus)

As a continuation to a previous series on community benefit, I thought this was a very thoughtful piece from an unique Chicago-based organization.

The Metropolitan Chicago Healthcare Council put together this very well-done economic impact report (pdf highlights or pdf full report) of Chicago hospitals on the community. Among the highlights:
- 400,000 primary and 2ndary jobs
- $23.7B in personal income for residents
- Better (and more sustainable) jobs with an average salary of $63k (~$20k more that region's average)
- $1.8B in capital spending, creating significant construction employment
- ~3,000 new hospital jobs per year through 2020.
- Every $1 in hospital wages creates $1.42 in non-hospital wages
- Every 1 hospital job creates 1.54 non-hospital jobs.

AHIP's new website, HSAdecisions.org, just published a consumer's guide to healthcare spending accounts: "what you need to know about HSAs, HRAs, FSAs, and MSAs." I work in healthcare and I still need help with this! thank you, AHIP.

Also HSADecisions site was recent news: as of 3/2005, 1,000,000+ people were covered by HSA/HDHP products. This is double from six months ago. Get ready for some more explosive growth.

Judging by the comments on Matthew Holt's recent posting on hospital price gouging, this isn't exactly a popular topic for the masses: how to increase hospital profits.

Yes, there is some price gouging (intentional and unintentional) going on out there. Yes, some hospitals are overly-aggressive with their collections practices. And yes, lots of hospitals still need to get together a coherent pricing policy (as well as a community benefit stance).

Nonetheless, hospitals also get the shaft thanks to patients who can pay but don't and government agencies that don't even pay to cover costs. To top it all off, many hospitals shoot themselves in the foot with poor medical information technology, wrong coding, poor management etc. It's these controllable revenue cycle factors that this HFMA white paper focuses on - worth a read.