Meeting your challenges

Ernst & Young’s Health Sciences Advisory Services practice (HSAS) is focused on helping health care providers strengthen their revenue and understand the risks they must manage in a complex and fast-changing business and regulatory environment.

We help clients obtain appropriate reimbursement from the government,managed care, and other third-party payers. We also offer services to help providers strengthen their financial management policies and practices, understand their capital needs, and comply with regulatory and reporting requirements.

Our team works with a broad spectrum of not-for-profit and for-profit health care clients, including hospitals, health care systems, HMOs, academic medical centers, long-term care companies, physician groups, and health insurance companies.

Ernst & Young has served the Health Sciences industry for over 40 years with broad vision, rich experience, and unwavering commitment. Over this period, we have provided assurance, tax, and risk advisory services to nearly two-thirds of the health care industry.

Health care's perfect storm: navigating in a world of reduced margins

Like a Perfect Storm (pdf, 6.2M), several problematic fronts are brewing at once on the US health care horizon—connecting, converging, and challenging hospitals. The realities of rapidly surging health care costs, flattening federal and state reimbursements, the uninsured and a worsening health care labor shortage are forcibly coming together—leaving providers with no easy solutions for surviving the looming squall.

The politics of 2008: the implications for health care providers

As health care providers grapple with current critical health policy issues, they also need to consider the implications of the 2008 US presidential election. Panelists in our 6 Dec. Thought Center Webcast discussed health care reform, candidate platforms, and steps providers can take to prepare for the financial impact of policy decisions. Watch for the video format archive.

To read an executive document (pdf, 878K) that summarizes the key points from the webcast panel discussion.

Healthcare change: reform or transformation? A CFO perspective

With the US healthcare system on the threshold of change, healthcare chief financial officers feel the need to anticipate change and begin the process of business transformation before the arrival of any public policy mandates. CFOs face daunting challenges (pdf, 1.9M), and insights from leading CFOs on the state of the industry are revealed in this report.

Webcast archive: policy issues for
health care providers

If you missed the 22 March live Thought Center Webcast, "Urgent Affairs: Impact of the New Congress on the Health Care Provider Market," watch the archived program in video format. Health care executives can learn more about health care policy issues and steps to take to prepare for the financial impact of potential regulatory and reimbursement changes.

Read the executive document (pdf, 386K) that summarizes the key points from the webcast panel discussion.

Physician alignment white paper

Today’s financial panorama suggests that hospitals and physicians have much more to gain by cooperating than by competing. Physician-hospital collaborations, when structured properly, can yield a host of benefits, including improvements in several key areas: economics, quality of care, operating performance, resource consumption and physician retention and leadership. Over the past several years, many different strategies, from simple to highly sophisticated, have been tested for improving the hospital-physician relationship (pdf, 1.9M). Each provides a different level of integration, risk and return.