Healthcare financial management : journal of the Healthcare Financial Management Association
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In February 1998, the FASB issued Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 132, Employers' Disclosures about Pensions and Other Postretirement Benefits. The new standard is designed to streamline pension and other postretirement benefits disclosures in public and nonpublic entities' financial statements. For nonpublic entities, the statement eliminates separate disclosures of the components of net periodic benefit cost, eliminates the disclosure of the components of benefit obligations and of alternative obligation measures, eliminates the disclosure of plan provisions, adds the disclosure of comprehensive income, eliminates the disclosure of sensitivity to changes in healthcare trend rates, and standardizes the disclosures for pension and other postretirement benefits. Financial managers and their organizations' actuaries and auditors should work together to determine which disclosures their organizations should make to be in compliance with FASB Statement No. 132.
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Healthc Financ Manage · Apr 1999
A strategic approach to allocating capital in healthcare organizations.
Using a strategic capital-budgeting method based on principles of decision analysis can help healthcare organizations allocate capital effectively when meeting requests for capital expenditures. This eight-step method requires establishing evaluation criteria, classifying proposals by area of investment, ensuring that proposals are complete and easy to understand, determining costs of proposals, rating proposals with respect to individual criteria, setting priority weights for criteria, calculating weighted value scores for each proposal, and ranking proposals by benefit-cost ratios. The results provide a reliable basis for optimal capital allocation.
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Healthc Financ Manage · Nov 1998
Easing the transition to an RBRVS-based physician compensation system.
In many provider organizations, traditional physician compensation systems based on patient charges have been replaced with resource-based relative value scale (RBRVS) systems, which pay physicians for actual effort expended. Group practices considering adopting an RBRVS-based system should be aware that the transition from one system to another requires careful planning. A four-step process that can ease this transition includes organizing a transition team, comparing CPT codes with the relative-value unit (RVU) schedule, designing and developing an RVU-based report, and analyzing RVU production data.