FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:                                          CONTACT:    Catherine Bromberg
January 22, 2009                                                                    Phone:  781-262-6027 
                                                                                                    Mobile: 617-331-2044

MHA Unveils First Report in Its “Containing Healthcare Costs” Series

Redundancy and unnecessary paperwork in the Massachusetts healthcare system add an estimated $5 billion to the overall cost of care, nearly 10 percent of all the money currently spent on healthcare in the Commonwealth. Such avoidable expenditures are the focus of Massachusetts Hospital Association’s first installment in “Controlling Healthcare Costs: A Report Series from MHA.” Cost is one of the most pressing issues facing healthcare today, but there is often an information disconnect between perception and reality on this issue,” said MHA President & CEO Lynn Nicholas, FACHE.  “Finding viable solutions and containing healthcare costs require a common understanding of the factors driving those costs, and a common commitment to tackling them.”

MHA’s “Controlling Healthcare Costs” series examines the factors behind the Commonwealth’s rising healthcare costs, and finds that the most viable solutions require simultaneous action on three different but related fronts:
• Reducing clinical variation
• Payment reform
• Administrative simplification

The current MHA report focuses on administrative simplification, the most frequently overlooked opportunity for substantial cost savings. The report shines a light on the myriad redundancies in insurance products, administrative processes, and regulation, reporting and licensure requirements that are currently driving up administrative costs for providers, and offers guiding principles for identifying and adopting simplification efforts.

Finally, the report calls for healthcare stakeholders to collectively implement four action items:
• Standardized transactions between providers and payers
• Standardized reporting requirements
• Improved claims processing and denial management procedures by payers
• Simplified and streamlined insurance cost and benefit information for patients and providers

“Providers, payers and state government must all work together to address the costly and time-consuming inefficiencies in our healthcare administrative processes,” Nicholas said. “Many of the same organizations that were part of the success of healthcare reform should now work towards making significant improvements and reductions in healthcare administrative costs. MHA is willing to lead the charge, but we cannot do it without the support of every other key player in the Massachusetts healthcare arena.”

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MHA Unveils First Report in Its "Containing Healthcare Costs" Series (Microsoft Word Document)
Controlling Healthcare Costs; A Report Series from MHA (Part I, Administrative Simplification) (Adobe PDF File)
Download Black & White Version (Adobe PDF File)