A Valuable Tool for Your Compliance Program
Physician contracting costs are rising quickly. Physician expenses have increased by 118 percent on average at California hospitals since the year 2000. The current economic downturn means tighter budgets at many hospitals, which means that controlling these costs is more important than ever.
MD Ranger reports are a valuable tool for reducing your reliance on individual fair market value opinions, negotiating contract renewals, and building your knowledge of a complex market.
Reliable market data is essential to effective contract negotiation and compliance with regulations, especially when it comes to determining Fair Market Value. Your current choices are few: You can rely on published physician compensation databases, limiting you to extrapolations based on overall practice economics, or you can commission an ad hoc survey— an expensive undertaking that may not provide sufficient detail to accurately evaluate a particular situation.
MD Ranger provides a better alternative that offers hospitals and health systems many benefits:
- Comprehensive data can lead to reduced need for independent FMV consulting opinions.
- Readily available market-based benchmarks for most physician arrangements enable rapid comparison to reliable industry benchmarks.
- Consistent documentation to support a strong compliance program.
Reduce Your Need for Individual FMV Opinions
Individual fair market value opinions can cost as much as $3,000 to $5,000 each. An MD Ranger subscription ranges from $6,500 to $19,000 depending on hospital size, with discounts available for multi-hospital systems, and covers dozens of services.
An analysis we performed for one regional system indicated that they could eliminate 30 to 50% of their cost for individual opinions with an MD Ranger subscription, saving them thousands of dollars each year.
A Powerful Tool for Negotiation
MD Ranger's market data can be a valuable tool when negotiating new contracts with physicians. See how much other hospitals similar to yours are paying, whether in the same region, of similar size, or with a comparable payer mix.
A New Tool for Compliance
In September 2007, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid began requiring hospitals to report on their relationships with physicians and their immediate family members. Initially, 500 hospitals are required to make these disclosures using a lengthy survey instrument that requires external documentation of fair market value.
CMS has announced its intent to make this reporting mandatory for all Medicare participating hospitals to enable scrutiny of arrangements for compliance with the Stark law. Arrangements identified for specific inclusion are on-call stipends, medical director agreements and service coverage arrangements. CMS uses an instrument known as the Disclosure of Financial Relationships Report.
MD Ranger reports can be used to assist with DFRR reporting as follows:
- MD Ranger standard reports will provide percentile ranges for many financial relationships that hospitals maintain with physicians (including ED call arrangements, medical administrative contracts and other service coverage arrangements).
- MD Ranger standard reports will provide market data to support the DFRR requirement for documentation of fair market value.
- MD Ranger custom reports can be produced to support other aspects of a hospital's DFRR compliance.
- Future products may be designed to simplify hospitals' reporting and compliance for the new DFRR requirements.
Special Benefits for MD Ranger Subscribers
- Standard reports designed to incorporate most standard contracts
- Internal benchmarking to compare a hospital's reported data with the percentile rankings of the MD Ranger database or other hospitals in a system
- Custom reports to address unusual situations or times when inadequate sample size limits publication
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