AKRON, Ohio — Akron Children’s Hospital provided nearly $60 million in benefits to its communities in 2008 — a 23 percent increase from 2007.
“Some of this change can be attributed to the increase in patients qualifying for charity care and government insurance programs, such as Medicaid,” said Shawn Lyden, executive vice president and general counsel for the children’s hospital system. Even before the nation’s economic recession, which has cost jobs and employer-provided medical insurance, Akron Children’s got the largest portion of its revenue from Medicaid, the federal health care program for the poor.
Akron Children’s also spent money to expand operations in the Youngstown area and committed $4 million to launch the Austen BioInnovation Institute in Akron last year, Lyden said.
Behavioral Health, Interoperability and eConsent: Meeting the Demands of CMS Final Rule Compliance
In a webinar on April 16 at 1pm ET, Aneesh Chopra will moderate a discussion with executives from DocuSign, Velatura, and behavioral health providers on eConsent, health information exchange and compliance with the CMS Final Rule on interoperability.
The concept of “community benefit” has become a political hot potato in the past decade. Created by the Internal Revenue Service in 1969, this broad basket of benefits replaced the government’s requirements that hospitals provide a certain level of charity care to patients who could not afford to pay. Some politicians believe hospitals put as many expenses in the community benefits basket as they can to justify continuing exemption from paying taxes.
Akron Children’s community benefit expenses include charity care, community outreach programs such as the Ask Children’s free physician referral and health information line, research, pediatric medical education training, patient care not fully reimbursed by government insurance programs and bad debt.
The hospital system reported its community benefits on a Schedule H filed with the IRS as part of its annual report to the tax authority. Filing a Schedule H is voluntary for hospitals this year. Next year, these filings become mandatory.
“The community benefit picture that emerges in this report is consistent with the mission of Akron Children’s today, as well as the day this hospital was founded in 1890,” Lyden said, commenting on why the hospital voluntarily filed a Schedule H. “We turn no child away because of his or her family’s ability to pay. We are committed to research and education and, through our child advocacy and outreach programs, hope to keep all children of our community safe and healthy — even those who may never pass through our doors.”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
The Ohio Hospital Association has reported that the state’s 178 hospitals, which employ 333,000 people, provided $14 billion for local economies through paid wages and benefits (pdf) in 2007 and
$2.2 billion in community benefits.
