The Premier healthcare alliance has introduced a new app, accessible in its PremierConnect integrated performance platform, which will aim to provide its members with specific estimates of the impact of health reform on their organizations. The app, called ReimbursementFocus, will help members project differences in payment from 2012 to 2019, with and without the policy changes mandated by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA).
ReimbursementFocus also includes information on the financial impact of recently passed healthcare legislation separate from the ACA, such as sequestration as put forth by the Budget Control Act of 2011, reduction in bad debt reimbursement as established by the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012, and loss of Medicare dependent hospital status at the end of federal fiscal year 2012.
“This app translates high-level policy into actionable information,” Keith J. Figlioli, senior vice president of healthcare informatics for Premier, said in a statement. “It estimates the financial impact of reforms by year and by policy while showing which quality deficiencies are leading to those impacts. This offers Premier members a road map to mitigate or, in some cases, reverse a potential negative consequence.”
The app also includes information on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) on hospital characteristics and performance. This means wage index, disproportionate share hospital, indirect medical education, outlier adjustment factors, and Hospital Compare hospital-acquired conditions and readmission rate data.
Premier is also incorporating information from its clinical, financial and operational comparative databases, where federal data does not exist. Files are preloaded with hospital-specific information and are customizable allowing users to test different scenarios like changes in their performance or future legislation.
This goes along with other apps from Premier including accountable care modeling and a value-based purchasing apps, which helps hospitals to calculate value-based purchasing scores on a real-time basis using actual performance period data.
