What They’re Saying
• The corporate healthcare industry faces tremendous and varied pressures that will likely continue to lead to weakening credit quality, Standard & Poor’s (S & P’s; New York) says in its upcoming annual Global Sector Review of the Health and High-Tech Industries. S & P’s says in the report that the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 has brought many changes to the industry and that, although almost all healthcare provider segments have been affected, the home health and skilled nursing segments have been hit especially hard. "The corporate healthcare provider industry has been under inordinate and unrelenting pressure the past year," the report says. "This year will be a seminal year, as companies either implement their strategies, metamorphose into another company, or fail."
• An editorial in The Indianapolis Star said encrypting information collected through the Outcome and Assessment Information Set (OASIS) is of little comfort "in an age when records can be moved from computer to computer in the blink of an eye and information of the most sensitive nature is for sale." Government has a right, the editorial stated, to collect some information when it is paying the bill. "But a 19-page questionnaire that solicits data of a highly personal nature is an exercise in bureaucratic zealotry."
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