Tag: hospital needs

The Role Of The Hospital In The Community

A hospital is a place where we can go if we get sick. It is a conducive place for people who require treatment for their illness. It also plays a big role in the community. A community will not be complete without the presence of a hospital. In fact, a hospital is the community center for health and wellness. The environment of this place is one of the healthiest and safest space that is good for patients, visitors, and staff.

Many of us do not appreciate the true value of a hospital unless we get sick. Many lives are being saved by hospitals. It is the perfect place for those who are experiencing major sickness such as cancer, brain diseases and other major injuries. There are some diseases that are incurable. However, hospitals have advance facilities and technologies to sustain the lives of the people. This place is not only treating sickness but it also helps improving the health of the community. Many hospitals are creating programs that offer financial assistance to patients who cannot afford to pay for hospital care. This helps people to get the care they need, without having to worry about financial payment.

It is true that a hospital has a big impact to the community. They are the critical partners in making sure that communities remain strong, vibrant, and healthy. They are not just treating the diseases of patients, but they also educate the community on how to become healthy and away from all sickness. We need to be grateful that hospitals are there for us to make our lives comfortable and convenient.

Hospital Credit Rating

Hospitals private or public have been relying on many different sources of income to continue operation. Many hospitals rely on bond funding for their development and the procure of new apparatus.  Revenue that is created by the hospital is then used to pay back the bondholders.  The risk to bondholders is that they are generally paid after the hospital pays its operational expenses.  Therefore, if the hospital is less profitable than expected (or not profitable at all), bondholders assume the financial risk.

Low-rated hospitals before have used strategies such as merging with higher-rated hospitals, diversifying payer mix, recruiting doctors, and opening new service lines in order to boost their credit ratings.  But these tactics may not always work in a system that rewards value rather than volume. Therefore a stable source of financial capital must be develop in order to increase the quality of healthcare services.

The CMS quality measures being tied more and more to hospital reimbursement CRAs are looking at ways to apply quality metrics to their hospital investment grade ratings.  These savvy agencies recognize the basic tenet that hospitals which give a higher level of quality care tend to be more profitable.  In the move from fee-for-service to value-based payment models in health care, it’s not surprising that CRAs are looking at different quality metrics when assessing investment risk.

The factors they are looking into include Medicare reimbursement rates publicly available quality scores, HCAPS scores, and commitment to establishing a culture of safety.  Some CRAs are also planning to highlight IT investments such as EHRs and data analytics platforms.They also looking at meaningful use and ICD-10 readiness.

The ultimate ability to change quality of care lies in the hands of the front-line health care providers. Tying these quality factors to hospital credit ratings and subsequent bond funding available should help to bring quality even more front and center in c-suite and hospital board meetings.  With the bottom-line becoming increasingly tied to quality and patient safety, hospital administrators need to work closer than ever with physicians and other constituents of the health care team to help them with the resources they need for institutional conversion.

Hospitals needs to be focusing on improving their eminence of care in advance of these changes. Those institutions that wait for the CRAs to act first may find themselves in an increasingly difficult place to receive bond financial support.  With the recognized inverse relationship between health care quality and expenditure, it would make sense to assume that those hospitals who might need bond funding the most may be the ones in worse shape to begin with.