Don McDaniel CEO Sage Growth Partners      On Wednesday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released the prices that more than 3,000 hospitals across the country charge for the top 100 most frequently billed discharges. The enormous spreadsheet lists what each hospital charges for each diagnosis related code (DRG), and what the [...]

  Deb Kephart, RN Vice President/Managing Director Sage Growth Partners   Providing true and accurate Meaningful Use (MU) attestation does not automatically ensure providers will pass The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) audit of certified Electronic Health Record (EHR) technology. It’s all about the documentation. Providers need to understand, that they and they [...]

  Stephen C Schimpff, MD Senior Advisor Sage Growth Partners   The Democrats and the Republican parties’ approaches to Medicare are quite different.  Which approach is better? That is the wrong question. Or at least not the most important question. Instead we should consider what could be done now to actually improve patient care quality [...]

  Chris DeMarco VP, Research and Planning Sage Growth Partners   When thinking about the hefty increases in FQHC funding and recent GAO reports critiquing FQHC oversight,[1] one question that arose for me was, “How can organizations optimize performance?”  Raised in Baltimore, I immediately thought of baseball hall-of-fame manager, Earl Weaver, and an interview I [...]

Don McDaniel CEO Sage Growth Partners        A recent Op-ed piece by Clayton Christensen, Jeffrey Flier, and Vineeta Vijayaraghavan in The Wall Street Journal discusses the potential, or more accurately in the authors’ minds, the limitations of the Accountable Care Organization model.  They argue that the presence of the ACO alone does nothing [...]

Anirban Basu Chief Economist Sage Growth Partners   Unhappy Hospitals We knew that there would be winners and losers emerging from the resolution to the so-called fiscal cliff.  The media have broadly proclaimed that among the winners are President Obama, Vice President Biden, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, the elderly and those households earning between [...]

By David Kovel GM, Health Care IT Solutions Chief Information Officer Sage Growth Partners   Healthcare is presently the greatest creator of new jobs and entrants into this growing labor market are struggling to catch on quickly. Unprepared individuals are pervasive throughout the health IT adoption supply chain. This includes a sales force struggling to [...]

By David Kovel Chief Technology Officer Sage Growth Partners I’ve been through a number of security risks assessments now and physician practices are slowly awakening to how porous their information system defenses have become. The ONC published a rudimentary SRA tool (download found here) to guide offices through the process of taking stock of their systems [...]

By David Kovel Chief Technology Officer Sage Growth Partners The rush to Meaningful Use attestation for 2012 is nearly over. A tremendous amount of system, workflow, and productivity has been destroyed and rebuilt. And while providers eagerly wait for their HITECH dollars to arrive, the efficacy of electronic medical records on quality, efficiency, and patient [...]

By David Kovel Chief Technology Officer Sage Growth Partners Ok – it’s been awhile since posting – but I feel like blogging again. This week we have been testing the network backup to the MPLS infrastructure at a number of physician offices that rely on wide area networking to reach the data center where they [...]