March 2014—Maryland may be one of the smallest states in the nation, but its new effort to reduce spending on hospital services could have a big impact on patient care and health care costs. In January, after a three-year, 10-site pilot program, most of the state’s hospitals decided to move to a system under which “the hospitals are given a fixed budget and asked to manage the care of the patients they serve within that budget,” says Maryland Hospital Association president and CEO Carmela Coyle.
The post How a Maryland lab met fixed-budget test appeared first on CAP TODAY.