Do you know what a reimbursement accountant is?

culled from:www.plrplr.com
Well I didn’t either so keep reading and you will find out.   Lately I have been thinking a lot about where I would like this blog to go in the future.  I have drawn out plans as to how I see it in the future.  While not working on the site in the past few days I have been deep in thought.  I conducted an interview for a newspaper and I have been busy at work.  This time of the year is especially busy in hospital finance.
Each year as the financial audits are coming to a close, the reimbursement staff in hospitals are beginning to get their gears going.  They are driving through every statistic that makes up the hospital that they work at.  They are figuring out which dollars are for salaries, which are for benefits and which are just capital costs.  The reason you ask is why, why go through such great lengths to determine what a salary dollar for a nurse is or what a discharge in the ICU is.


The way that capital costs and salary dollars are allocated to the specific departments can have an impact on how that particular operating unit is paid.  Understanding the payment systems of Medicaid and Medicare is no easy feat to grasp; I have been working here for 3.5 years and still at times have difficulty.
The financial and statistical data is submitted to Medicare and Medicaid to analyze and put into the hospital rates in the future.  This report is filed annually for all the hospitals across the country that participates in the program.  This is a time consuming and arduous process that takes more than a month to complete, in fact I start working on it after the start of the New Year and do not finish until the end of May for Medicare and the end of June for Medicaid.  When completed each of the reports is close to 200 pages long.
What do you think; did you think there was much data compiled by Medicare and Medicaid?  This is in addition to all the government tax forms like the 990 and payroll stuff.  If you are bored Google CMS 2552-10 to find out about some of the forms that are necessary to be completed.  So with that said, I have revised my posting schedule for the time being to Monday, Wednesday and Friday.