Entrepreneur convinces Ca. town to let him buy hospital in hopes of saving it with remote lab services billing - Entrepreneur Generations

Rural hospitals have been making headlines lately because of possibly fraudulent billing schemes, in which laboratory service business owners buy struggling hospitals and then issue billing for their lab services through the hospital, regardless of where the lab tests were performed. Rural hospitals are paid high reimbursement rates than urban ones, so lab services make a higher profit that way.

Insurance companies and some in Congress are crying foul over the practice, but one Denver entrepreneur pitched it as a way to save a struggling rural hospital he wanted to buy — and the town agreed. On June 5 the town of Cedarville, Ca., voted by 83 percent to allow Beau Gertz to buy the bankrupt 26-bed Surprise Valley Community Hospital, according to the hospital's interim administrator, Bill Bostic.

Gertz, who owns clinical-lab and nutraceutical companies, promised the town's residents that he would retain vital services, and that "he’d like to open a 'wellness center' to attract well-heeled outsiders — one that would offer telehealth, addiction treatment, physical therapy, genetic testing, intravenous vitamin infusions, even massage," Heidi de Marco and Barbara Feder Ostrov report for Kaiser Health News. "Cedarville’s failing hospital, now at least $4 million in debt, would not just bounce back but thrive, he said."

His plan to pay for the improvements: Hospital doctors would help remote patients through telemedicine, and that way lab test bills could be issued through the hospital, regardless of where the telemedicine patients live. "If you do it correctly," he told Kaiser Health News, "there is a nice profit margin. There [are] extra visits you can get from telemedicine but … it has to be billed correctly and it can’t be abused."

The people of Cedarville were skeptical of Gertz, since other outsiders had made similar pitches. But they were evidently swayed by his vision, if yesterday's vote is an indication. "The people of Surprise Valley want to keep health care in the valley, and this is how they want to do that," Bostic said.

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2sBmP2h Entrepreneur convinces Ca. town to let him buy hospital in hopes of saving it with remote lab services billing - Entrepreneur Generations

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