In past blog posts we have tried to keep you up-to-date on the proposed mandatory Medicare cardiac bundles that are (currently) set to commence in July 2017 (see Mandatory Medicare Cardiac Bundles: Final Regulations (Possibly) ).
CMS announced on December 20th that they are moving forward with the mandatory Medicare cardiac bundled pricing model by issuing final regulations.
Today’s cardiac catheterization laboratories, noninvasive cardiology and vascular service departments must manage and store extensive amounts of patient data – clinical documentation, analytics and images – tasks that have led to the ubiquitous adoption of a comprehensive CVIS.
It’s easy to take things for granted – until they are gone. Denton Cooley, one of the most famous heart surgeons ever, died Friday, November 18, 2016 at the age of 96, a month or so after the passing of his wife of 67 years, Louise Thomas.
If you follow CFA’s blogs, you know we have written extensively on low volume cardiac surgery programs and the challenges they face in the evolving era of value-based healthcare (refer to Low Volume Surgery Programs: The Need for Next Generation Assessment).
The issue of consolidation of services between hospitals within a system is increasingly important and many health systems are evaluating this option.
It is inevitable that whenever CMS issues proposed rules on new or expanded programming – in this case the recently proposed mandatory Medicare cardiac bundles set to begin in 2017 – comments, criticisms, suggestions and recommendations on the program start to surface. “Pushback,” if you will.
Today’s cardiovascular medical groups must deal with a continual barrage of reimbursement and regulatory changes. Fee-for-value, ICD-10, at risk contracts, and the newly announced cardiac bundling initiative for hospitals (set to begin in selected Metropolitan Service Areas in 2017), are but a few examples.
Looking back more than twenty-one years to when I first considered establishing Charles Franc & Associates, Inc. (CFA), it doesn’t really seem like more than two decades have passed.
The results of the second year of CMS’s voluntary bundled payment experiment – Bundled Payment for Care Improvement (BPCI) – are now in, and the results for CV patients are decidedly a “mixed bag.”
