Studies Reveal Impact of New Medicare Reimbursement Regulations

September 6, 2007 — The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has issued the most sweeping rule changes for hospital reimbursement since 1983.
The new regulations, which affect acute care hospitals nationwide, go into effect October 1, 2007, and will have significant impact on how hospitals are reimbursed for in-patient services (IPPS), according to recently completed studies by American Hospital Directory.
Under the regulations, there will be redistributions of reimbursement among some medical services and among certain types of hospitals. These changes are caused primarily by a new severity-adjusted DRG system and transition to a new weighting methodology used by CMS to set relative weights for payment.
Despite the extensive changes, many hospital administrators and healthcare executives do not yet have a clear understanding of how the new regulations will impact their hospital operations.
American Hospital Directory (www.ahd.com) has posted the studies on their website where they can be linked from the home page. Custom data services are also available for analyzing impacts on particular operations, transfers to other facilities, outlier payment for costly cases, and other components of reimbursement.
For more information: www.ahd.com