Over the past five years, the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has been more aggressive about identifying organizations that fail to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and its impending regulations. Historically, OCR has taken a reactive approach to noncompliance t...

SUMMARY In his keynote address at ANESTHESIOLOGY® 2016, Michael E. Porter puts forth his vision for value-based healthcare and the need for anesthesiologists to reorganize the way they practice, stretch their involvement in the care cycle, practice at the top of their license, measure value by measuring outcomes, embrace bundled payments and use an...

For years, anesthesiologists have been acutely aware that this country's healthcare reimbursement regime is in a state of significant transition. Government healthcare programs (such as Medicare and Medicaid) and commercial payers are gradually moving away from a fee-for-service model to value-based payment programs that focus on the quality and ef...

SUMMARY The incidence of surprise billing is increasing, as is the introduction and passage of state legislation to protect patients from potentially devastating medical expenses. Surprise billing legislation passed recently in California, set to go into effect in 2017, is likely to trigger a wave of heightened activity at the state level. A new Br...

You trade on it every day. It may be your anesthesia group's most important asset. It's difficult to quantify, but in the accounting sense, "good will" is the value of your anesthesia group's assets above and beyond the tangible assets or the net present value of your group's future cash flows. For example, good will was a substantial portion of th...