When it comes to medical billing collection rates, the phrase “no margin, no mission” can ring too true. After all, if a care center doesn’t bring in enough revenue to keep things running, any higher purpose they have is meaningless. That’s why you devote so much time to keeping your center or federally qualified health center afloat. But it’s important to remember that the reverse of this well-known phrase is also true: No mission, no margin. If you’re devoting too much time to the billing side of your practice, it’s the patients who suffer.
Hospital readmission penalties seem to have been working as intended, by driving down 30-
day hospital readmissions and saving Medicare roughly $2.3 billion between 2010 and
2016. The unintended consequence, however, was that hospitals serving the poorest of
the poor were the most frequently penalized. Medicare has made changes to mitigate
that, but safety-net hospitals still struggle with reducing hospital readmissions largely attributable to social determinants of care, and they still risk penalties that could push them over the fiscal
edge.