This is part 9 of our 10-part checklist to make sure your charitable hospital can remain tax-exempt. Today’s topic concerns notifying the CEO and board of directors of your financial assistance policies and procedures.
This is part 9 of our 10-part checklist to make sure your charitable hospital can remain tax-exempt. Today’s topic concerns notifying the CEO and board of directors of your financial assistance policies and procedures.
Topics: 501r
This blog is one of a 10-part series on how charitable hospitals can retain their tax-exempt status. Today, we have arrived at part 8 - “We provide written notifications to individuals 30 days before making extraordinary collections actions.”
Topics: 501r
Continuing in our 10-Step Checklist To Maintain Your Tax-exempt Status, we arrive at point number seven: “Provide a Plain Language Summary of Your Financial Assistance Policy.”
While it is not technically necessary to provide this plain language summary to patient's you feel would be in need of financial assistance, you should consider doing this anyway, in an effort to demonstrate your compliance with the new 501(r) regulations.
Topics: 501r
To help understand the section of the 501(r) in regards to what hospitals can charge an uninsured patient, here is a quote from U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa): “Tax-exempt hospitals don't have many measures of accountability for their special status. The law hasn't given them much direction, and so they've defined standards for themselves. Sometimes that's resulted in providing very little charitable patient care or other community benefits, failing to publicize charitable care to patients, charging indigent, uninsured patients more than insured patients, and using very aggressive collection practices... The provisions take steps to differentiate tax-exempt hospitals from for-profit hospitals and provide further transparency about tax-exempt hospitals' fulfilling their charitable mission. Congress, the IRS, and the public will now have additional tools and information to ensure that charitable hospitals act charitably.”
If you’ve been following our blogs recently, you are aware that we have been providing additional education that was included in our “10-Step Checklist To Maintain Your Tax Exempt Status”. This week, we are focusing on item #5 in the checklist that states: “We have refrained from engaging in extraordinary collections actions.” There is a lot to decipher in that verbiage, so let’s look at a few aspects of this requirement.
Topics: 501r
In the previous blog, we focused on defining the Financial Assistance Policy (FAP), which will outline how your patients can get help, if they need it. The next step is to make sure your patients know that financial help is available. How? Well, according to the 501r, you are required to take measures to widely publicize the FAP. Here’s what that means:
Topics: 501r
Charitable hospitals, being in the business of helping the less fortunate in their communities, are tasked with letting their patients know how they can qualify for financial help. Therefore, in order to remain tax-exempt, a charitable hospital must establish a Financial Assistance Policy (FAP).
A non-profit hospital’s community health needs assessment (CHNA), a critical part of 501(r) regulations, can be a huge, lengthy and collaborative undertaking - but for good reason. Item 2 on our 10 Step Checklist is “We have an implementation strategy in place to meet the CHNA needs.” Or, in other words, “Here’s what we’re going to do about it.”
Ever since the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) was enacted, hospitals and organizations have been inundated with a constant need to keep up with new information and implement strategies in accordance with regulations under the health care reform law. But the ongoing challenge is this “new information” doesn’t exactly provide a clear plan of action distinctly saying “This is what you need to do and this is how you need to do it”.
Outsourced solutions offered to hospitals by Business Process Outsourcing companies (BPOs) significantly reduce the need for in-house resources and relieve the stresses of trying to keep pace with the ever-changing healthcare landscape. Those solutions are particularly important when managing healthcare IT functions, because moving into 2015 and beyond, IT functions are changing more rapidly than ever before.
Topics: ICD-10
