Alternatives to Hospital Employment Include Solo 'Micropractices,' Patient-Centered Medical Homes, and Direct-to-Pay Practices Andy Robeznieks at Modern Physician reports that medical practice innovation—including the use of technology to increase efficiency and reduce overhead—is what "holds the key to private practice being a viable alternative to salaried employment," according to a new report from the P ...

Cost Approach is Best Used Simply to Allocate Value Under the Income Approach, Contends Mark Dietrich   Mark Dietrich is concerned that a recent presentation at the NACVA annual conference may have misrepresented the views he expressed with a number of other authors in a paper published in Hospitals and Health Systems RX that was titled Assessing Intangible Value in a Physician Practice Acquisition.  He cut ...

The Most Critical Challenges Confronting Medical Practices Recently, the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) published results of its member survey and listed the top challenges facing physician practices today.  Reed Tinsley recaps results. Here are critical factors physician executives should focus on to control costs, build incentives, ease management, and strengthen growth. ...

Two New Taxes on Net Investment Income and Medicare Will Take Effect on January First At the Wall Street Journal's Tax Report, Laura Saunders explains.   The word is out: Two new taxes on the affluent and wealthy will take effect as scheduled next year as a result of the Supreme Court's decision upholding the health-care overhaul. One is a new 3.8% tax on net investment income, and the other is a 0.9% incre ...

The Big Picture: Medicaid Impact,  Patient Demand, Physician Pay, and More.   Physicians Practice, a leading practice management resource, has examined the implications of the historic Supreme Court healthcare decision. Eschewing opinion about John Roberts or the impact on insurance company stock prices, the coverage helps physicians understand what it means for them.  Offering commentary as well as analyzi ...

Mandate Survives as a Tax.   Limits on How Widely Feds Can Control States Medicare.   No Other Limits. Brent Kendall, Louise Radnofsky, and Jess Bravin of the Wall Street Journal report the news: ...

The Financial Professional's Guide to Healthcare Reform; Accountants' Handbook, 12th Edition New titles from Wiley this summer include Scott Miller on Buyouts, Dietrich and Anderson’s thorough Financial Professional’s Guide to Healthcare Reform, Roman Weil et al. on Litigation Services and the Financial Expert, and Graham and Carmichael’s Accountants' Handbook, 12th Edition.  ...

Uncertainty Surrounding the Court's Pending Decision Causes Transaction Delay  Private Equity International's Graham Winfrey reports that whatever way the Supreme Court rules on healthcare may end up driving more industry activity.   ...

How to Arrive at an Appropriate Fair Market Price for a Medical Practice When valuing a medical practice, how do you determine fair market value in light of recent Stark II regulations? Some of it depends on the definition of the term “commercially reasonable.” And a lot also depends on accurate assessment of future revenues, as well as expense assumptions. Here’s a guide to what to keep an eye on as you na ...

Structuring Competitive Physician Compensation Models Healthcare financial executives need to understand valuation methodology to ensure legal and regulatory compliance. Specifically, when developing and reviewing their physician compensation programs, healthcare organizations should understand the market data, test outcomes of incentive plans for fair market value, and check total compensation for fair mar ...

Metropolitan Corporate Counsel interviews Monte I. Dube, Partner, and Elizabeth M. Mills, Senior Counsel, of Proskauer’s Health Care Department in Chicago. Excerpts: What are the current trends in M&A within the healthcare industry? Dube: Increasingly and for multiple reasons, U.S. hospitals and healthcare systems of all types are looking for potential partnerships or affiliations. Financially distresse ...

Far fewer small employers claimed the health insurance tax credit for small businesses in the health care reform law than were eligible, according to a new government report.  So reports Michael Cohn at Accounting Today: The Small Employer Health Insurance Tax Credit was included in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 as a way to help small businesses pay for the cost of health insurance. ...

Americans with employer-sponsored insurance had fewer hospital stays and visited outpatient clinics less frequently from 2009 to 2010, but prices for inpatient and outpatient care rose by about 10% or more, according to a Health Care Cost Institute analysis of more than 3 billion claims for medical care. The average price of generic drugs fell over the same period, but prices for brand-name drugs rose, the ...

Becker's ASC Review, a site that provides Practical Business, Legal, and Clinical Guidance for Ambulatory Surgery Centers, recently published an article on benchmarks that ASC administrators often neglect. These are important benchmarks not just for ASCs, but for any physician executives, healthcare practice managers, and the valuators and consultants they work and plan with. An excerpt: Chance Sherer, mana ...

Medical Practice Benchmarking, Financial Performance, and Quality Care Benchmarking physician practices is an important way to assess practice value by comparing a practice's norms to peer practices in similar specialties or in the same geographic reason. Most physician practices, according to experts, can benefit substantially from benchmarking. Moreover, it's pretty easy to do! Here David Fein discusses w ...

What Data Valuators Need from Physician Practices—and Why! Physician practices are increasingly undergoing consolidation. Often that means being acquired by a hospital, and a prerequisite of being acquired is having a valuation performed by an independent, third-party valuator. Here’s information on the sort of data that valuators need (and that physician practices should be collecting today), an explanatio ...

New Medical Billing-Code Provides Precision; Nine Codes for Macaw Mishaps  Today, hospitals and doctors use a system of about 18,000 codes to describe medical services in bills they send to insurers, Anna Wilde Matthews reported in the Wall Street Journal not too long ago.  Apparently, that doesn't allow for quite enough nuance.: A new federally mandated version will expand the number to around 140,000—addi ...

Three Practice Management Trends for 2012  For the third year, the MGMA has published the State of Medical Practice in MGMA Connexion. It's an overview of issues and industry perspectives that will shape medical practice this year. The Association collected information from healthcare professionals about the ways in which EHRs increase revenue, as well as what affects your compensation and practice collecti ...

Practice Management Companies Look to ACOs for Growth  Physician practice management companies are forging ahead with expansion plans into new areas of hospital-based medicine as they position themselves to participate in accountable care organizations and other aspects of health system reform, reports Victoria Stagg Elliott at American Medical News. The companies are not buying primary care and other outpa ...

Adjusting, More M.D.’s Add M.B.A. Under heavy pressure from government regulators and insurance companies, more and more physicians across the country are learning to think like entrepreneurs, reports Milt Freudenheim at the New York Times: “All physicians need some kind of business training,” she said. “For example, some physicians with large research grants don’t know how to manage the money.” As for the ...