A few weeks ago we finished parsing through the Florida data sets and created some great reports on myhealthcaresource.  Florida facilities report a lot of financial information in their medicaid cost reports, even some that we haven’t seen reported in other states we’ve worked with.  I’m going to walk through some of the more interesting data sets and highlight some things that can be learned that would have previously been difficult.  As an example, I’m going to focus on the facility in Florida we have available for free currently, Delta Healthcare Center.

General Information

A lot can be learned about a facility through these reports.  Home offices can be correlated across facilities to figure out common ownership.  Addresses, phone numbers, emails, administrators, and the number of employees are all very useful.  Let’s look a little closer at the patient days & utilization report.

Patient Days & Utilization

Here we can see how many patient days are claimed for each category, such as Medicare, Medicaid, Private, or Other.  The Max Patient Days field are the maximum the facility could possibly report (total beds * 365).  The utilization rate is the percentage the facility was able to reach of its maximum capacity.

Many people use Resource Utilization Group III (RUG III) days to determine the type of care a facility is providing for its patients.  These numbers are provided by the federal government is the Medicare cost reports.  We provide this data in addition to the Medicaid information we provide because it is unique to the Medicare cost reports.  In the Patient Days & Utilization report, the total Medicare days listed roughly corresponds to the total RUG III days listed.  The RUG reports break down the Medicare days listed by the Florida facilities into much more detailed categories based on the intensity and type of care required for the patient.  Unfortunately, we do not have such detailed utilization statistics about Medicaid, Private, or Other patient days.  Even without this, we can learn a lot about the type of patients cared for at this facility by looking at the percentage of days that are paid with private, medicaid, or medicare funds.

Ownership and Staff

For some, this is where the most useful information can be found.  Here we can learn who is running the show and through our state-wide analysis reportswe can also determine which other facilities they are involved with.

Owners/Officers/Admin

Below is an image of the Owners/Officers/Admin report.  In this case, we get a pretty clear picture of the people in charge.  Scott J. Bell is the president, John J. Tolan, Jr. is the CFO, Dana Foster is the COO, and Edward Trehern is the CAO.

Delta Healthcare Owners

We can take this information and go to the state-wide report for Owners/Officers/Admin.  Sorting the results by name we can see that Scott J. Bell is the president of many facilities.  Below is an example pulled from the state-wide report.

Other facilities owned by Scott J. Bell

Related Facilities

As we just demonstrated, we can use this owner information to determine relationships between facilities in the state.  In this case we found facilities with a president in common.  Alternatively, we could use the Related Facilities report if the facility provides the information.  In this case, most or all of the facilities we found through common ownership are listed in the Related Facilities report.

Assets and Liabilities

In this category we can find a summary of the financial health of the facility.  We can determine if they are in debt, have large loans, or have made very large purchases in the last year.  Florida’s information is unique in the detail that facilities provide for acquired assets.

Acquisitions

Facilities provide a list of current period acquisitions and prior period acquisitions.  In this list they show almost every significant asset that they acquired during those periods.  For example, let’s use the state-wide analysis report for prior period acquisitions and see who has made the biggest purchase.  Below we can see this list.  Pines of Sarasota and Waterford Health Care Center list the largest purchase by far at over 9 million dollars.  How useful this particular piece of information is could be questionable, but knowing what type of large purchases a facility is making is obviously very useful.

Prior Period Acquisitions Orderd By Cost

Revenue and General Expenses

This is where a large part of the core financial data for a facility is located.  Aside from ancillary expenses, many of the expenses a facility has will be located in this category.  It ranges from lawsuit costs to administrator salaries.

Revenue Overview

This report provides a good summary of which cost centers are bringing back in the most money.  Below is what we see for Delta Health Care Center for its revenue report.

Delta Health Care Revenue

Legal and Accounting

Each facility must prepare its finances each year that are submitted to the federal and state government for Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement.  Compiling such a complex financial document costs money, and the cost they paid for this is usually reported on the Legal and Accounting report.  For Delta Health Care Center, they do not list any of those accounting fees on their Legal and Accounting report.

Just as interesting though, is the legal fees listed on their report.  It reveals that they spent about $13,000 on a resident lawsuit.  This is nothing though, when comparing these costs state-wide.  Sorting the legal costs in descending order reveals that Emerald Health Care Center had almost $700,000 in legal fees for patient litigation.

Legal Costs sorted Descending

Administration

The most interesting thing about administration cost is probably to see what each facility is paying in administrator salaries.  Some facilities don’t report this field, and If there were multiple administrators then it is not separated, but it gives a pretty good estimate of what the facility is paying in administrator salaries.  We can use the “Toggle PPD” button to see how much they are paid per patient day (per bed per day).  For Delta Health Care Center, they are paying $82,908 in administrator salaries.  This is most likely a single person’s salary.  Using the PPD button, we can see that they are paid $2.342 per bed per day.

Looking at the state-wide analysis report, we can see that Seminole Nursing Pavillion is paying almost $500,000 categorized under administrator salaries.  Either this is a mistake or they are paying $11.185 per bed per day for administrators, which is almost 5 times that of Delta Health Care Center!  Of course, there might be a perfect reason for this number, and only by looking more into the facilities report can we get a good overall idea.

Thanks

All of these numbers tell a story once they are put together correctly.  Hopefully myhealthcaresource can help you do just that.  Thanks for your interest in our service.

The Myhealthcaresource.com Team

Site Updates:

Trial System

We have changed our free trial system to a credit-based system instead of a time-based one.  Previously, users could sign up and browse our data sets freely for seven days.  We felt that this gave potential customers the best example of what we are offering.  Now, when users first sign up, they receive five credits to view facility reports and two credits to view state-wide analysis reports.  We find that new users spend more time with each report and hopefully have a better understanding of what data and tools are available.  We found that with a time-based system, new users were focused on looking at many facilities briefly, instead of delving deeper into a single facility’s data.

Free Previews

We understand that our users are busy and we want to provide the easiest and quickest way for you to determine what we’re about.  In the past, users had to sign up for at least a trial before being allowed to view any of our data.  This was typically to prevent abuse and to keep track of free trial usage.  We are now periodically rotating free facility and state-wide analysis reports on the front page.  These are actual reports that we have removed the sign up restriction on temporarily.  A new visitor to myhealthcaresource can now view samples from any of the state’s we have available with a single click.

Homepage Content

The data we provide has a very specific audience of health care professionals dealing with facility finances and operations.  Initially we hoped that we could “sell” users on the usefulness of our data and services even if they had no previous experience with it.  We thought focusing on these users would help us create and intuitive interface that also allowed experts to get the data they needed as well.  The result, though, was a very positive response from those already working with this data, and confusion or indifference to those that didn’t understand.  We realized that we need to focus on the users that already need our services instead of attempting to convert others.  Our homepage now reflects this with new content focusing on exactly what data we are offering.  In the future, our goal will be to provide CPAs, CFOs, owners, and others dealing with facility finances the tools and data they need to do their job more informed and efficiently.

Search Engines

As search engines crawl through our data, people are now starting to find our site through Google or Bing by searching for their own name or company name.  The number of people finding us this way has been growing steadily for the past few months.  We decided that we needed to give these potential users an example immediately upon arriving at the site.  When users are referred from Google or Bing we allow them to view the page they were searching for, even if it requires logging in.  There is a max of 3 views to reduce abuse. We hope that this helps users searching for medicaid cost report information find what they’re looking for.

How To Section

We also removed the how to section because it no longer reflected the new data that has been added to the site.  We will be reworking this to add back in the future with video examples to help people see how to manipulate the data on the site.

Thanks!

We hope that our users will continue to provide feedback about the data and the site’s interface.  There are more exciting improvements in the pipeline that will be out in the next few months.

The Myhealthcaresource.com Team