The problem is, that the health care system here is planning a lot. How do you save money, by removing or adding ICU beds? One hospital nearby here just added 5 more beds to their existing 20-bed ICU, in order to save money, reducing overall health care costs.
If you cannot provide detailed data on what you're doing, you may have no arguments against budget costs, and you certainly cannot document well how an increase of your budget can reduce the overall costs of the hospital, or how an increase of your budget can reduce the costs of treating a specific problem.
Most billing is actually not done, because the payer is also the treater, so discussions are not restricted to the detail level of billing.
A good example was when one of our customers looked at 90-day mortality of their patients, distributed on the departments that delivered the patient. More than 60% of the patients from the cancer dept died. It's a small percentage of the ICU patients, however, by splitting them into cancer groups, they discovered that 3 out of 5 cancer types had 100% mortality. So, now they are discussing how to handle these cancer types better. These kinds of discussions can be handled on a departmental level, as long as the doctors have access to detailed statistics about their own patients. |
