Returns, not burns: how to ensure successful health IT investments.

With many types of financial investments, the hospital financial community has long-established, and relatively straightforward, practices for projecting and measuring returns. Not so with health IT investments, however, where returns can be difficult to identify and quantify and even harder to track. Yet the success of such an investment depends on measuring the returns--whether they be tangible or intangible, short-term or long-term--because effectively tracking returns is the only way to be sure of achieving them.

Blood and marrow transplantation compensation: perspective in payer and provider relations.

The high cost per patient of hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) causes this therapy to be the focus of much controversy, given the competing societal demands to provide all possible therapy to preserve life while simultaneously limiting global health care expenditures. Treatment and eligibility decisions for HCT often are heavily scrutinized by both governmental and private payers and not simply determined by physicians, facility providers, and the patient. In an effort to control costs, payers have administrative infrastructure to review resource utilization by these patients.