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The Impact of Healthcare Reforms on Hospital Costing Systems

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The Impact of Healthcare reforms on Hospital Costing Systems

The costing systems implemented in hospitals has been the same for a while now. It’s worked and has been easily allocated based off of averages from previous years. Now as times change so will the costing systems for hospitals in order to get the most beneficial cost-reductions to them as well as improve on efficiency. This article looks into how accountants for hospitals can redesign, reposition, and re-implement costing ideas to allocate on a per-unit of care basis (Selivanoff, 2011). We’ll take a look at two ways for accountants to prepare for these reforms and five steps to adjusting the costing systems in place. In the hospital costing system accountants want to measure costs during a patients stay to determine how much resources are being used. The one way accounting departments are improving efficiency is deter away from the average costs for their resources. Rather than allocating a hundred dollars for this test and a hundred dollars for this procedure they want to implement an “on-the-fly” care plan. Which measures truly how much a patient is costing them to get the optimized cost-reduced methods. It allows them to take a deeper look into inventory and assign costs to each resource so that patients really pay for what they used and hospitals have a clear costing method that’s equal for every person. This method is effective but is highly stressful for the accounting department to record at first. The second method to prepare for healthcare reforms is looking at the financial outcomes of alternatives to providing care for patients. By anticipating changes that will result from reform and communicating with managers about certain issues that should be addressed, hospital cost accountants can preemptively prepare for the challenges of the new healthcare marketplace and position their

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